Would a Briere-Pronger tandem work in Philly?
The former stars would definitely be short on experience, but would make up for it in swagger and hockey acumen. And they might just complement each other quite nicely
Nice guys do not necessarily finish last. They do, however finish 29th and 26th, which is where the Philadelphia Flyers stood last season and where they were in the NHL standings this season when they fired GM Chuck Fletcher Friday.
In an industry that is brimming with very good human beings, Chuck Fletcher is a beacon. Full of integrity, honesty and decency, he is as quality a person as you’re going to encounter in the hockey world. But he is out of a job today because being a good person does not win championships. If that were the case, David Poile would own a couple of Stanley Cup rings by now. This is a results-driven business and on that basis, things looked very bad for the Flyers and, even worse, did not seem to present any prospect that things were going to get better in the near future.
Fletcher is a good person who did a poor job with the Flyers. He made some very good moves, acquiring Owen Tippett from the Florida Panthers in exchange for pending unrestricted free agent Claude Giroux among the best. There were a number of bad moves, Shayne Gostisbehere and two draft picks for nothing and Robert Hagg and a first-round pick (which the Buffalo Sabres used to select Isak Rosen) for Rasmus Ristolainen being the worst. His free agent signings have been mediocre at best. Sure, Kevin Hayes is going to get his points, but is $7.1 million on a long-term deal a good spend for a guy who doesn’t really move the needed when it comes to actually winning?
Fletcher made a shrewd deal trading Nolan Patrick and it wasn’t necessarily on him that Ryan Ellis played only four games for the Flyers before having his back go out. Sean Couturier and Cam Atkinson being unavailable this season has not helped his cause, either. But somewhere along the line during the Fletcher tenure, the Flyers lost their way. They have become bad and boring and, worst of all, irrelevant. When your handpicked coach comes out and says things like , “I don’t know what to tell you. We don’t make enough plays, we haven’t made enough plays and we probably won’t the rest of the year,” For all the moves Fletcher made, most of them were marginal player-for-marginal player deals that didn’t accomplish much of anything. Failing to get something, anything for James van Riemsdyk at the deadline was probably the tipping point, but Fletcher wasn’t likely to get much for him or any of his other yard sale items.
What the Flyers need now is someone in the hockey department who can reenergize the market, recapture the team’s identity and give the team some of its swagger back. It must be someone with both a hockey pedigree and a presence. And since the Flyers intent to bifurcate the job into one GM and one president of hockey operations, he’ll need to be able to play nicely with others. Is interim GM Daniel Briere that person? Perhaps, but after almost three years in which he has been out of the game, it might be time to dust off Chris Pronger, remove him from the boutique travel business and put him back where he belongs in an NHL front office.
It appears that Briere, who has done his time in the minors, is probably going to get one of those jobs. Would a Briere (president) and Pronger (GM) combination work in Philadelphia? One the one hand, it would be very short on experience. On the other, it could represent a meld of two very sharp hockey minds whose personalities might just play off each other enough for it to work. It would, of course, depend a lot of the job descriptions and which man would have the ultimate say in hockey matters, but this is an organization that needs an injection of life more than the Detroit Red Wings did when they hired Steve Yzerman as their GM in the summer of 2019.
Despite their inexperience, do you see either Briere or Pronger getting fleeced by a rival GM? With Briere as the hockey ops president, overseeing things and reporting to ownership, and Pronger doing the boots-on-the-ground work of building a scouting staff and procuring players, they would probably need some time to both get things order and hit their stride. One GM once told me that Pronger has a treasure trove of hockey acumen and that his scouting reports on players are thorough and detailed. The Flyers could go out and hire someone who has a track record of running an hockey operations department, or they could take a chance that two all-time great former players have what it takes to get this thing back on the rails.
FUN WITH NUMBERS - SITUATIONAL SCORING
In hockey, there’s an old saying that suggests they don’t ask how, they ask how many. Well around here, we don’t simply ask how many. We want to know how many mattered.
So here’s the weekly update to Hockey Unfiltered’s Situational Scoring Race. And, as the name suggests, it measures situational scoring, specifically which players produce offence at the most crucial times in the game.
As always, there are a couple of things to note, the most important being that goals are weighted more heavily than assists, with goals worth one point and assists worth half a point. In this system, goals can be worth more than one point and assists worth more than a half a point. For example, the first goal of a game is automatically worth two points, one for being the first goal of the game and one for putting that player’s team ahead in a game. An overtime or shootout-deciding goal is worth three, one for putting the team ahead, one for being the game-winner and one for the overtime goal. If that is the only goal in a 1-0 game, as it was on Tyler Toffoli’s shootout winner for the Calgary Flames against the Minnesota Wild earlier this week, it’s worth four.
It can all be a little confusing, so here’s a glossary:
FIRST: When a player scores the first goal of the game.
AHEAD: Any goal that puts a team ahead at any point in the game, including overtime.
TIED: Any goal that pulls a team into a tie at any point in the game.
COMEBACK: A goal that is scored when a team is trailing by two goals or more and is part of a series of goals that eventually ties the game, regardless of the ultimate outcome of the game.
WINNER: A game-winning goal, but not by the NHL’s definition. The game-winner in this category is the goal that puts a team ahead in a game to stay. So in other words, you could have a 7-6 game and maybe the first goal of the game was the game-winner.
OT: Overtime goal.
SO: Only shootout game-winning goals are counted in this category.
NHL: Where the player stands in the actual NHL scoring race.
I’m not a Flyer fan, but feel their problems are cooperate ownership. It will be interesting to if the Penguins will follow suit too, and who is actually in charge.