The Flyers will likely add a healthy Lindblom, Patrick, Frost, Friedman, maybe a wild card like Laczynski. That’s not small potatoes. Guys like Farabee and Myers and Hart should only improve.
We should never have to see Thompson, Grant, and a slim chance of Hagg again. Hopefully, Therrien gets canned. I won’t get my hopes up about the last two because hockey.
Try not to f*** it up, Chuck Fletcher. If this postseason proved one thing, we need as much talent as possible to outplay less talented teams. This current product is not more than the sum of its parts. So better stock up on parts. Pretty much every chance Vigneault had to show himself a changed man proved a dud. Player performance was inconsistent, but this team as a whole was outplayed and outsmarted nightly. Approaching the off-season, doubling down on bad decisions — and finding some new ones — is what concerns me.
(Pleasure spending another season with you fascists).
I would be hesitant in saying Patrick will remain healthy or for very long. Wouldn’t be surprising to see a recurrence there.
Either way, the biggest impact players there are Myers and Hart. Maybe Patrick if everything goes well in terms of injury and development.
The worrisome thing for me, in terms of roster construction, is the same problem they’ve faced ever since they dealt away Carter/Richards. They essentially have two cores here. A long-term one that’s still wait-and-see to some extent and a short-term one pushing into their 30’s that hasn’t gone the distance yet. The underlying problem there being that most of our forward group is in their declining years and on the 30+ side. Most of our impact youth is in the net out short of Frost, Patrick, and Farabee all taking big strides in the near future. Even if they do, I don’t see a potential Giroux replacement there.
This team has been Groundhog Day for most of my time as an adult fan. Every year people get pissed off, complain about the same shit, and every year most people are right back on board by the end of the off-season despite there never being any change. Flyers never tank, Flyers are never good enough to win and almost never good enough to be a contender, are almost never bad enough to get a franchise player, always make the same awful hiring decisions, etc.
It’s gonna be the same thing as last off-season. Fans are mad now, will be mad and supportive until coaches are rightfully fired, they’ll be fired way too late, fans will be 100% on board again despite the next coach not being any better, and all the meanwhile they’ll made mediocre adds in the off-season that fans will blindly support despite the inevitable mediocrity to come. Rinse and repeat.
