Complete Preview for the Philadelphia Flyers' 2014-15 Season
The Philadelphia Flyers returned to the postseason after a one-year hiatus, but that didn’t prevent change at the top of the organization. General manager Paul Holmgren was pushed upstairs in favour of Ron Hextall, an executive who has been long seen as an NHL GM in waiting.
Hextall faces a difficult task in Philadelphia.
The Flyers are not the 100-plus-point regular-season team they were for so many years under Holmgren, and they aren’t the team that could be reliably counted on to win a playoff series every year and go on a deep run some seasons.
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The club Hextall inherited is instead a bubble team that was outscored at even strength and squeaked into the playoffs on the back of its special teams.
Things got worse over the summer. The loss of Kimmo Timonen to injury will likely not be made up by the signing of Michael Del Zotto, while the trade of Scott Hartnell for R.J. Umberger moved a good player with a bad contract for a middling player with a bad contract.
A slew of low-end signings—notably depth defender Nick Schultz and Frenchman Pierre-Edouard Bellemare—isn’t liable to have a big impact.
As Hextall tries to improve the team, he will be hindered by salary-cap issues inherited from his predecessor. Philadelphia is currently almost $5 million over the cap ceiling.
What We Learned in 2013-14
For all the obvious strengths on their roster, the Flyers as currently constructed are not a very good team in five-on-five situations.
The Flyers have long had exceptional special teams, and that didn’t change in 2013-14, as both the power play and penalty kill ranked as top-10 units in the NHL. The trouble was at even strength, where Philadelphia’s performance was on par with teams like Ottawa and Winnipeg.
Ordinarily, that would be blamed on the goaltending, but Steve Mason had an exceptional campaign between the pipes. Even Ray Emery wasn’t bad five-on-five—his poor season had more to do with lousy work on the penalty kill (.853 save percentage).
The Flyers lost the puck-possession battle at even strength and as a result lost the goals battle too.
Key flaws in the roster were exposed. Vincent Lecavalier was a dud in the first season of his ill-advised five-year contract. Rather than bolstering an exceptional top nine, he acted as an anchor weighing it down. The defence wasn’t close to good enough, prompting the Flyers to trade for and then sign Andrew MacDonald, even though his performance over a short span was decidedly unimpressive.
If the team is ever to claw its way back above the playoff bubble, those flaws must be addressed to strengthen the club’s even-strength play.
Outlook for 2014-15
It’s extremely difficult to argue that the Flyers have conclusively addressed their problems.
Handcuffed by limited cap space, Hextall was largely reduced to tweaking at the edges of the roster. That leaves little reason to expect significant strides from the team.
There are areas where the team can hope to improve organically—Brayden Schenn and Sean Couturier are already excellent and still in their early 20s—but there are enough weaknesses that a significant drop down the standings is not out of the question.
Philadelphia’s primary strength is an extremely impressive top-nine forward group built around three duos:
| Michael Raffl | Claude Giroux | Jakub Voracek |
| R.J. Umberger | Brayden Schenn | Wayne Simmonds |
| Zac Rinaldo | Sean Couturier | Matt Read |
| Jay Rosehill | Vincent Lecavalier | Jason Akeson |
| P-E Bellemare |
Giroux is an elite forward who finished third in Hart Trophy voting in 2013-14, and regular partner Voracek is a fine player in his own right. Together, they form the foundation of an excellent top line that can run up the score and play against anyone.
Couturier and Read are listed as third-liners, because that’s how the hockey community has been taught to think about checking lines, but they’re incredibly important—outside of Giroux, they're probably the most important forwards on the roster.
They play the toughest competition on the team, take on tough zone starts and still perform exceptionally. Certainly head coach Craig Berube values them.
The truest test of a coach’s faith is ice time, and Couturier and Read rank second and third among Flyers’ forwards in minutes per game.
Filling the secondary scoring role are Schenn and Wayne Simmonds. Superficially, these two had ugly underlying numbers last year, but that’s misleading because they were shackled to Lecavalier for half the year.
Simmonds’ Corsi percentage jumps from 43.4 percent with Lecavalier to 53.9 percent with Hartnell and 58.0 percent with Michael Raffl, the two other wingers primarily used on that line.
These are good players, and with competent help—which they may or may not get—there is no reason they can’t excel as second liners.
Left wing is a bit of a dog’s breakfast, but thanks to the six guys we just looked at, the Flyers should be able to get away with it. Raffl, Umberger and Bellemare could find themselves on any of those lines, with Lecavalier perhaps showing up on a scoring unit.
The fourth line and reserve group are heavy with enforcers and question marks, but Akeson is an interesting prospect whose chances would be improved immensely if he were a left-handed shot.
Additionally, it’s important to note that the battle for depth slots is going to be extremely competitive. The Flyers have four or five players not listed above who could make the team somewhere in the No. 12 to No. 14 forward range.
The weakness of the club is its back end:
| Andrew MacDonald | Mark Streit | Steve Mason |
| Braydon Coburn | Luke Schenn | Ray Emery |
| Michael Del Zotto | Nicklas Grossman | |
| Nick Schultz |
The defence flat-out isn’t good enough.
We don’t know what form the pairings will ultimately take, but CSNPhilly.com’s Tim Panaccio reported recently that Berube was looking at pairing Coburn with Schenn, an arrangement which would suggest that MacDonald will be paired with Streit, who was an occasional partner during their time with the Islanders.
MacDonald was the veteran fix the Flyers turned to at last season’s trade deadline, but he’s been an advanced-stats horror show for years now and isn’t likely to change his stripes just because it would be convenient for Philadelphia.
Streit wasn’t able to correct that as a younger man with the Islanders—he isn’t likely to correct it now.
Coburn is a very good player and should be okay anywhere. It seems a fair guess that if he sticks with Schenn, he’ll be in a shutdown role, spending a lot of time with the Couturier line and leaving MacDonald’s pairing as generalists.
The pairing’s success is going to depend on Schenn, who isn’t certain to succeed in that role.
The depth isn’t particularly impressive, either. Grossman’s okay, and pairing him with a puck-mover seems like a sound move. He may even work his way into the top four.
However, the guys behind him have real problems. Del Zotto is young and has some upside, but was a late signing in the summer because he has massive holes in his game. Both the New York Rangers and Nashville Predators have given up on him within the last year.
His contract with the Flyers pays him less than half the salary he made a year ago. Nick Schultz was a healthy scratch in both Edmonton and Columbus.
This is a group that could really use a rapid return to health from Timonen, though the 39-year-old’s NHL future is uncertain following an offseason diagnosis of blood clots.
The weakness on defence is going to put a lot of pressure on Mason to live up to his performance last season and the Flyers’ obvious faith in him.
History suggests that it’s extremely rare for a goalie to break out at the age of 25. While we tend to think of 25-year-olds as having upward potential, by that age they’ve generally established what they are.
Mason may be the exception to the rule. Philadelphia is betting heavily on it, to the point of employing a backup goalie in Emery who has blown hot and cold over his major league career and can’t be firmly counted on to step in if the man in front of him falters.
The Flyers are a team that faces a wide range of possible outcomes this season. The forwards would not be out of place on a true contender. They’re an excellent group, and if the defence and goaltending are even passable, this is a team that should make the playoffs and could even start the year with home-ice advantage.
But the potential for an epic collapse exists, too.
Mason has a not-too-distant history of destroying the playoff chances of otherwise capable clubs, and if he collapses, the Flyers don’t have a strong internal option while their ability to land a good external one will be limited by their cap space.
The defence is a Coburn injury away from being perfectly terrible.
Jonathan Willis covers the NHL for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter for more of his work. Statistics via NHL.com, Stats.HockeyAnalysis.com and BehindtheNet.ca. Salary information courtesy of CapGeek.com.
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