All too often, when an NHL team fails, people learn the wrong lessons. That can be troubling for many reasons, most pressingly: that if they don’t realize why they failed, they could be doomed to make the same mistakes.
To some extent, it doesn’t seem like Jakub Voracek totally understands what happened with the Philadelphia Flyers in 2018-19, or maybe he’s simply too close to everything to truly process it all. Emotions run high, and as we’ve seen before with Voracek, he often doesn’t mask those emotions.
(Hey, at least Voracek isn’t running his team while taking the wrong lessons. Looking at you, Bob Nicholson, who blamed Tobias Rieder for the Oilers’ failures. Consider Edmonton Exhibits A-Z in always trying to treat symptoms instead of the disease.)
While reflecting upon the Flyers’ season, Voracek said he doesn’t want to take anything away from it, and told the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Sam Carchidi that they “choked.”
“We had a good push, but unfortunately, anytime we got close — three points, five points — and we played those big teams in front of us [in] those four-point games, we choked,” Voracek said. “We couldn’t find a way to win those big games, and that’s why we are where we are right now.”
The painful reality is that, frankly, the Flyers probably weren’t good enough to “choke.”
Instead, they’ve straddled that line between good and bad where their fates often boil down to the whims of luck.
Personally, it’s most instructive to go back to two phases of the Flyers’ season:
- Their mediocre 15-22-6 start, one that cost GM Ron Hextall and coach Dave Hakstol their jobs.
- A two-month hot streak from mid-January to mid-March.
To start the season, the Flyers were a pretty strong possession team, finishing in the top 10 in various metrics (including controlling high-danger chances) by Natural Stat Trick’s measures. Amusingly, they were one of the absolute weakest teams by those same measures during their hot streak.
The differences, then, were some combination of Carter Hart and luck.
PDO combines a team’s shooting percentage and save percentage, giving you a handy (if broad and imperfect) snapshot of a team’s luck. Early on, the Flyers suffered from lousy goaltending and were shooting at a middle-of-the-pack rate. During their hot streak, they were the second-luckiest team in the NHL, and while Hart’s goaltending factored in, their 9.98 percent even-strength shooting percentage ranked second in the NHL.
Long story short, the Flyers have been an unlucky team with shabby goaltending, and then surged when they were getting all the bounces and all the stops.
Breaking: that was always unsustainable.
The question, then, becomes: how can they fix things for next season. Voracek’s comments to Carchidi are a good starting point ... because it’s not necessarily an easy fix.
“Tough to say. It’s not my decision,” Voracek said. “I’ve got to prepare myself in the summer and come in here in shape and be a better player, more experienced. Hopefully, we won’t have to focus on digging ourselves out of a hole by December.”
Indeed, it really is tough to say. But maybe there are a few things the Flyers can do.
Getting the coaching situation right is a great start. Should they stick with Scott Gordon, or might they try to go bold and aim for Joel Quenneville?
For all of the good things Hextall did as GM - particularly cleaning up the enormous salary cap messes that stemmed from his predecessors going big all the time - maybe he was too stagnant in certain areas. Hextall didn’t pull the trigger on two key decisions: waiting too long regarding Carter Hart, and waiting too long to move on from Hakstol.
Would the Flyers be in a different spot if the team zigged instead of zagging with those two decisions?
Ultimately, such questions are only hypothetical, so it’s crucial to get the next decisions right.
Basically ... they better not choke.
—
James O’Brien is a writer for Pro Hockey Talk on NBC Sports. Drop him a line at phtblog@nbcsports.com or follow him on Twitter @cyclelikesedins.