The Philadelphia Flyers Will Probably Be a Playoff Team. They Don’t Look like One.
The Philadelphia Flyers Will Probably Be a Playoff Team. They Don’t Look like One.
Philly would be one of the worst playoff squads in recent history.
Judging from Philadelphia Flyers coach John Tortorella’s demeanor recently, you’d never know his team was in the thick of a playoff race — and in fairly good shape to come out ahead, at that.
Philly currently holds onto the No. 3 slot in the Metro division, with a four-point buffer over the last team on the outside looking in from the East, the Washington Capitals. They face the 11th-easiest remaining schedule according to my Elo ratings, and they have an 80% chance in my meta-forecast at hanging on and making the playoffs. Nothing is assured, but they’d have to collapse pretty badly over the next 12 games to be hunted down and surpassed by a Washington team that carries a -31 goal differential on the season.
Yet, Torts has been coaching with an extra level of petulance, even by his standards. Against his former team, the Tampa Bay Lightning, a couple of weeks ago, Tortorella went ballistic on the referees and got himself ejected — then refused to leave the bench for a full minute and a half:
Later, Tortorella made his captain, Sean Couturier, a healthy scratch for the first time in his career — supposedly without communicating as much to Couturier beforehand — and then refused to answer questions about it with reporters afterwards, continuing his antagonistic relationship with the Philadelphia press.
To some degree, this is all Torts being Torts. The 9th-winningest coach in NHL history didn’t get to that level by being nice; in fact, he was already legendary for his prickly persona with both the media and his own players. With these Flyers, it’s probably true that his mind games have elicited exactly the response he wanted — the team had lost 3 of 4 before Couturier was scratched, and he wanted to shake things up. (Philly won against Toronto later that night, though they dropped the next game to Carolina in overtime.)
But Tortorella wouldn’t need to lean into his belligerent side quite so much if his team was better.
This is, after all, a team that ranks 22nd in goals scored per game and has the league’s worst save percentage (by a mile) since No. 1 netminder Carter Hart was put on indefinite leave from the team for his alleged role in Hockey Canada’s sexual assault scandal. A quarter of their wins on the entire season happened in two winning streaks during the month or so between Jan. 10 and Feb. 12. They haven’t had a win streak since then, but they’ve had three separate losing streaks in that span.
The Flyers will probably make the playoffs, based on that 80% figure from before. The competition nipping at them from below in the standings — the Caps, Islanders, Devils and Penguins — all have their own problems, while the NHL’s point system makes it difficult to overtake opponents who even have a modest lead in the standings, because of the dreaded loser point.
(Under the old pre-2000 system, which featured ties and arranged teams by conference, the Flyers and Devils would be tied for the final spot in the East. But the weakness of Philly’s division — both wild-card spots are occupied by Atlantic teams — and the difficulty of closing even a 4-point gap, when you can gain points with losses, should keep the Flyers safe.)
Maybe Tortorella can sense that, despite the playoff cushion, his team just isn’t very good. It ranks 17th in Hockey-Reference’s Simple Rating System (SRS), which adjusts goals-per-game differential for strength of schedule, and 25th in the Elo rankings — below a bunch of teams who won’t come close to sniffing the postseason.
With an Elo mark of 1477, Philadelphia would be tied with the 2020-21 Montreal Canadiens — a team that made the playoffs (and even went to the Cup Finals) in no small part because of the league’s weird COVID-era divisional format — for the second-worst final regular-season rating of any playoff team since the 2005 lockout, ahead of only the 2011-12 Florida Panthers:
Not every team on the list above flamed out immediately in the postseason, either, so maybe Torts can squeeze some life out of the Flyers when the playoffs start a month from now. But in light of all of his team’s weaknesses, maybe indulging in histrionics is the only tool a cranky coach has at his disposal sometimes.
Filed under: NHL