Welcome to RANKED. Each week we will be ranking players, moments and anything else we can think of, hockey or not. This week, since we are distraught about the Philadelphia Flyers most likely missing the playoffs, we decided to rank all the reasons why.
Unfortunately, barring this team suddenly being able to win three of their final four games and everyone else around them in the standings collapse into nothing, the Flyers are probably not going to make the playoffs. We were full of hope and repeating “Why not us?!” ad nauseum after every single win as the Flyers began to lock themselves into the third spot in their division. Now, they find themselves on the outside looking in and the momentum is heading into the ground.
But what or who is to blame for this collapse? We were riding high and now we’re thinking about what we’re going to be doing instead of watching the Flyers in a couple weeks.
There are multiple reasons — some real and some absolutely obscene — as to why this happened. Let’s go ahead and rank them.
9) Sean Couturier being named captain
Look, we have to include at least one point from the braindead, reactionary fan that just wants to blame everything on the captain. Sean Couturier was named captain, has not looked great, was a healthy scratch for two games, and now is leading a team that is freefalling in an endless pit of darkness. We completely understand the gut-feeling of just pointing your index finger, shaking, at the one that is supposed to be the leader, and saying it is all their fault, but there are so many more reasons as to why this is happening.
We sort of feel bad for Couturier, having to come back from missing an entire season, getting hurt throughout this year, and getting lumped in with this misery.
8) John Tortorella
There are many things that John Tortorella has done that should be deemed questionable. Whether it is certain deployment or roles that players have played, but without him, we wouldn’t even be able to talk about a collapse, it would just be a smoldering pile of a hockey team as we start to watch the Phillies instead.
Tortorella deserves a heck of a lot of credit for what he has done this season, during the good and bad times. Even during this horrid stretch of losses, he has still reliably put young players in the prime opportunities to play themselves out of it. He isn’t going to go ahead and kick off the young guys and put the veterans at the top of the lineup for more predictability — he is committed to development and seeing what these players, who should be here for years to come, can do.
He has done roughly a thousand times more good than bad.
7) They are actually cursed
The Flyers are cursed. That’s a reason. They hold my hockey soul in the palm of their hands and squeeze the life out of it at every chance they get. Instead of being predictably bad this season, they gave us hope, and this curse has driven us to the brink of insanity — believing in the Philadelphia Flyers when everyone said we shouldn’t, and now we are paying for it.
6) The trades they made
We all knew this was a rebuilding year. Right from the start, as soon as the new management team was announced, they were actually saying the word and we were elated. So, rightfully so, they traded some good players that made this team better. Defenseman Sean Walker was handed out as a rental and they got a first-round pick for him, that was an easy one and it would have been silly to keep him around, despite being the team’s best defenseman.
And even going back further, any trade was just getting rid of a deemed problem. Cutter Gauthier was a necessary move, and Kevin Hayes just didn’t gel with the coach; add in the Ivan Provorov trade that just keeps on giving, and the trades should not be a reason at all.
The only aspect that justifies any trade as a reason why this team is collapsing is that Sean Walker could have been very handy to have. But, what might be even more handy is having a first-round pick or the prospect drafted with it, when this team is actually trying to win.
5) Injured defensem*n
Other reasons are more broad and generic as to why the Flyers suck ass. But, for more recency, it is pretty easy to equate them losing three of their six typical defensem*n to injury, as one hell of a connection between the two. Not many teams can survive losing half of their blue lines.
Losing Jamie Drysdale, Rasmus Ristolainen, and Nick Seeler was devastating. The replacements played fine, some youngsters like Adam Ginning have actually exceeded expectations, but the team has not been able to fully commit defensively like they did with a fully healthy blue line, and they suffered for it.
For this, we can just clap our hands together and just go with this reasoning. There’s nothing too deep, just lost some guys.
4) They actually just stink
Astronaut meme ass reasoning as “oh, but they have actually always been this bad” but maybe it is just true. They might just be done riding the high of low expectations and now, with the pressure put on, they are back to their true talent level as a mediocre team that is falling down a wormhole out of the playoffs.
This team has no true star at the top of its lineup — unlike every other team in a playoff position — and had uncertainty on just about every forward line, defensive pairing, and in the crease. No one really knew what was going to happen and the season could have just been simulated forward without really finding out anything new.
Maybe, just maybe, this can be the period where we come to grips with where this team is truly at and missing the playoffs is where they belong. (No, it would have been fun. This sucks.)
3) Power play
Let’s truly get in the muck. What has been a thorn in the side of this Flyers team all season long, and has kept them from truly reaching any heights of being a decent team that can cement a playoff spot, is what they have done (moreover, the lack of doing) on the power play.
For three consecutive years — unless they suddenly score a dozen power-play goals by Game 82 — the Flyers sit at the bottom of the league in terms of converting power-play opportunities. That is absurd and something reserved for absolutely nothing teams who deserve nothing.
To do some very basic, surface-level math, the Flyers have had a total of 424 minutes on the power play as of Monday morning, that is fifth in the NHL. But due to their lowly 31 goals scored on the man advantage, that means they have scored one single goal for every 13.6 minutes they have had on the power play. That is insane. To put it into more digestible numbers, that’s 4.52 goals per hour of the power play — obviously, the lowest in the NHL.
But what if that became just average? Or even below-average?
Let’s take the Seattle Kraken’s power play success rate. They are 19th in power-play-goals-per-hour (so not even average) with 7.50 after scoring 48 goals in their 384 minutes on the man advantage. Not insane expectations, but if the Flyers managed to do what the Kraken did this season on the power play, that’s a total of 53 power-play goals — a remarkable 22 more.
There is a very rough idea that five goals should equate to a win in the NHL, according to people who create the Wins Above Replacement metrics in this sport. So just by saying that, that should mean at least four more wins for the Flyers and eight more points in the standings and a playoff spot clinched some time this week.
I want to live in this fantasy world where the Flyers have a good power play.
2) Goaltending
While the power play is getting a lot of the reason, it has been bad all season long. Nothing really changed for this recent collapse, it just kept on being bad, unlike the team’s overall goaltending.
Looking at the team-wide Goals Against Above Expected — essentially the opposite of the typical Goals Saved Above Expected statistic that uses expected goals to better understand a goalie’s individual effort — it is just so easy to see where the drop-off began. As soon as March hit, it did not matter who was in between the pipes, the Flyers just kept on allowing more goals than expected and it has reached to now them allowing almost 20 more goals than what they should with an average goaltending tandem.
And even further, thanks to our pal Ryan Gilbert, the five-game rolling save percentage has just been steadily decreasing, to now being some of the worst goaltending we have ever seen.
Maybe more obvious than any other factor or reason why the Flyers stink, the goaltending has completely fallen off a cliff. A tall cliff. The steepest cliff you can imagine.
The team has just not been able to get a save no matter what in the last few weeks and it is just a direct correlation. Because, obviously, if you keep allowing a lot of goals, you’re going to be losing hockey games.
1) They forgot how to score goals all the time
Two things have gone terribly wrong for the Philadelphia Flyers to cause this stretch of losses: Goaltending and the inability to score goals. The goaltending was expected with the personnel available, but the sudden collapse of being able to put any puck beyond the goal line has been critical.
Just look at that. Comparing the Flyers’ actual goals to their expected goals, it has just simply fallen off a cliff for the month of March. They were hovering around being right in line with expected goals, and then getting some shooting luck during the hot stretch of December and January, but ever since the All-Star break, it has been a steep decline.
It’s just simple as that. The Flyers suck right now and the reason we think that is at the top, is just not being able to score any damn goals. It’s much more frustrating to watch the offense’s inability to shoot the puck past any goaltender, than allow some stinky goals because Sam Ersson isn’t the next Hasek.
This collapse is just so frustrating, and maybe it’s just a combination of everything.
