How the Flyers Fumbled a Rebuild... Then Fired the Coach Who Tried to Fix It
Today's Case Study is about chasing contention before it’s earned.
Welcome to the first edition of 📂 Case Studies, a series where we dive into the real-world dilemmas faced by sports franchises — unpacking the pivotal decisions, missteps and strategic crossroads that shaped their fate.
“I'm not really interested in learning how to coach in this type of season, where we're at right now.” — John Tortorella
Once a postseason fixture — making the playoffs 16 times in 17 seasons from 1995 to 2012 — the Philadelphia Flyers spent most of the 2010s on a more inconsistent path, finishing the decade on a run of nine straight alternating seasons with or without a playoff appearance from 2012-2020. The team had made the Stanley Cup Final in 2010, losing to the Chicago Blackhawks, but Claude Giroux was the only member of that squad still around as the 2020s approached. A franchise that practically never committed to rebuilding seemed destined to finally press the reset button.
And then, the pandemic-altered 2019-20 season happened.
The Flyers were already better than expected when play was paused due to the Coronavirus, with the veteran trio of Giroux, Jakub Voracek and James van Riemsdyk getting support from younger forwards (Travis Konecny, Sean Couturier, Kevin Hayes, Scott Laughton) and defensemen (Ivan Provorov, Travis Sanheim, Philippe Myers) alike. But when things resumed in the bubble, Philly found another level still — winning all three round-robin games (by a combined score of 11-3), then beating the Canadiens before eventually losing to the Islanders in 7 games. And unlike just about always, their goaltending wasn’t horrible with 21-year-old Carter Hart between the pipes.
For the Flyers, this seemed to be all the evidence they needed that the next generation was ready to seamlessly step up as part of a re-tool, not a full-blown rebuild. But five years later, that strategy seems to have fully run its course with Thursday’s news that the team was firing coach John Tortorella as its playoff odds have vanished — symbolically ending the win-now logic that guided this era. It all begs the question: What if the Flyers had accepted reality when they had the chance?
The Dilemma: Rebuild, or Reload?
Throughout the mid/late 2010s, Philly found itself stuck in on a treadmill of mediocrity where it was never bad enough to bottom out, and often even capable of making the playoffs, but never good enough for more than a first-round exit once it got there. Every time the Flyers seemed to conclusively swing in one direction or another, contending or rebuilding, they would snap back the other way and make their trajectory less obvious.
Even after a miserable 2018-19 season that saw them finish 16 points out of the playoffs with the youngest roster in the league, a situation where many teams would shop their remaining veterans and look to execute a longer-term rebuild, the Flyers instead re-tooled around their core, hired veteran coach Alain Vigneault, brought in Hayes and Matt Niskanen, and generally tried to run back an improved version of the 2017-18 team that made the playoffs, but did it with a deeply average 42-40 record and +8 goal differential.
And somehow, it all seemed to work. Philadelphia immediately posted its best goals-per-game differential (+0.52) since 2003-04, as its veterans and youngsters meshed smoothly en route to that second-round playoff appearance — Philly’s first postseason series win since 2011-12. In November 2020, the Flyers ranked sixth in The Athletic’s NHL future power rankings.
But under the surface, the rebuild was reliant on a lot more going right from there. Chief among those factors was the development of Hart, who had shown high potential but was still just a few years removed from being the 48th overall pick in the draft. There was also a huge amount of pressure on the breakout young skaters (Konecny, Provorov, Sanheim, etc.) to continue their upward trajectories right away, as the expectation was to keep winning with those younger players gradually taking on more central roles. At the same time, Philly had to figure out what to do with the veterans — most of whom were on long-term deals — without blocking the talent pipeline for the future.1
By 2020-21, the Flyers’ rebuild looked substantially less promising. Hart melted down with one of the worst goalie seasons ever, and almost all of Philly’s core skaters underwhelmed versus expectations. The Flyers dropped to a -0.68 goal differential — a massive decline, and their worst mark since 2006-07 — and finished 13 points out of the playoffs in the NHL’s weirdo 56-game season format. Things got even worse the following season, as the team’s big offseason veteran acquisitions (Ryan Ellis, Cam Atkinson, Rasmus Ristolainen, Keith Yandle) failed to work out, and the offense completely cratered to 31st in the league with Vigneault getting fired by midseason and Giroux shipped to Florida at the trade deadline.
At this point, the Flyers were coming off a significantly worse season (-1.06 GPG differential) than the 2018-19 flop that had presented their first fork in the franchise road. But instead of hiring a developmental coach and getting back to basics, Philly brought in the volatile Tortorella, who had a knack for turning things around quickly — the type of hard-driving, veteran-favoring, defensive-minded coach you pick up when you’re on the cusp of contention, not coming off your worst season in 15 years.
Add in the divisive presence of Tony DeAngelo in the dressing room, and the Flyers were once again taking risky swings at short-term success, trying to build higher on top of a foundation that was already wobbling.
The Fallout
The 2022-23 season, Tortorella’s first behind the Philly bench, saw the Flyers improve some — but no more than we would expect from pure positive regression to the mean. They were still bad (-0.67 GPG diff.) and still lacked top-end talent, as the players who were supposed to carry the torch into a new generation largely saw their performance stall out. Hart was one of the rare examples to the contrary, playing at an above-average level under Torts, but he left the team — and probably will never play again — after being charged over his role in the 2018 Hockey Canada sexual assault scandal.
Philly continued to incrementally improve in 2023-24, even looking like a probable playoff team late in the schedule. But as I wrote at the time, the Flyers would have been one of the most fraudulent playoff teams in recent memory if they’d made it, based on their poor goal differential (-0.32) and Elo rating. And in fact, they ended up collapsing badly (losing 9 of their last 11 games and 12 of 16) to miss the postseason by 4 points.
Finally, this year has been a totally lost season for Tortorella and the Flyers. Uncharacteristically saddled with the league’s second-youngest roster and its absolute worst goaltenders, there has been little Torts could do except turn loose Konecny and rookie sensation Matvei Michkov and hope for the best. (Hence, his quote about “not being interested in learning how to coach in this type of season” at the beginning of this story.) While Tortorella usually wears out his welcome before too long anyway, he tends to at least rapidly improve his teams within a few years of taking over behind the bench — but that was not true in Philadelphia:
The most notable moments of Torts’ Philly tenure came in controversies that had little to do with the games themselves, such as his tiff with a reporter over Hayes’ role in prospect Cutter Gauthier, the No. 5 pick in the 2022 draft, spurning the Flyers.
That in and of itself isn’t overly shocking, given Tortorella’s prior reputation as a coach, but the surprise is that his prickly moments weren’t also paired with wins and playoff appearances. Ultimately, the Flyers never once reached a league-average Elo rating during Torts’ time behind the bench, a true testament to the failure of this recent chapter in franchise history.
The Lessons
The main takeaway from Philadelphia’s multi-part botched rebuild might be that you can’t skip steps along the way back to success.
At several critical points in the past decade, the Flyers tried to dodge the painful part of a rebuild by deluding themselves or looking for shortcuts — whether in the form of short-term free agent fixes, questionable acquisitions (Ristolainen, DeAngelo) or bringing in veteran coaches whose rigid styles didn’t match the direction of the team.
Building a modern NHL contender requires patience and careful planning — and even then, your big swings still don’t always work out. But the Flyers seemed to constantly be chasing any glimmer of contention, even when it turned out to be a mirage. (Perhaps they had become too addicted to the idea of making the playoffs during that stretch of appearances from the mid-’90s into the 2010s.)
In some ways, the Flyers were also in an awkward position, because they had to balance between the Giroux era — during which he was, at one point, unironically considered by some to be better than Sidney Crosby — and whatever came next. We’ve seen with the actual Crosby what happens when you try to hold onto a star-powered run well past its natural endpoint. The Flyers didn’t try to do that, in part because they were excited to see what Konecny, Provorov and friends had in store.
But that excitement led to denial after it became clear that the 2020 rebuild wasn’t progressing according to plan. Instead of reassessing, the Flyers doubled down, hiring a coach in Tortorella who would wring the potential out of Philly’s talent without considering that maybe the next generation wasn’t good enough to carry that weight.
Or at least, maybe it was a foundation that needed time, not pressure. By layering on short-term urgency and win-now expectations, the Flyers never gave this era much of a chance to truly succeed. Now, with Tortorella’s sacking, they finally appear to be moving forward with honesty about rebuilding — the one thing they tried to avoid committing to at all costs.
Filed under: NHL, Case Studies
An immediate veteran departure came in the form of Niskanen, who was very good in 2019-20 but abruptly retired before the 2020-21 season due to concerns over COVID-19.