The cream of the crop in the NHL are the Rangers, Red Wings, and Bruins...not sure anyone can deny that. Those three teams have a lot of talent, but also play unbelievable team defense, and that is their identity.
In my first post I wanted to address our personnel and the inconsistencies that lay within our lineup.
Now I want do talk about The Identity of this team and Direction. A lot of you brought up that this is a young team and that the amount of rookies we have make it difficult for us to compete on a nightly basis. I agree with that conclusion. You can only expect so much from rookies.
However, the fact that we have so many rookies on this team is a result of our trades and personnel management. We traded two established forwards for a variety of new players including rookies. That was the choice of management. They brought on rookies, they got rid of nodl, and now we are in our current predicament.
We could have played this season with Read, Rinaldo, And Gustaffson as our only rookies to see significant playing time. But we went in a different direction traded Carter and Richards and now we have a much younger and inexperienced team. Ok I can see the point in that direction. What confuses me is the Transactions that go against this "youth movement" Ideology.
The Jagr, and Bryzgalov signings were clearly "Win Now" signings. If we wanted to go with a youth movement we would have developed Bob and Allowed JVR to play on the top line with Giroux. Jagr and Bryz come in and now Bob is in limbo and JVR has been deemed expendable. Now add on top of it the trading away of draft picks for UFA defenseman.
So as a fan Im confused, are we trying to win now or are we trying to win in the Future.
This lack of direction and identity by the management is confusing for the fan.
The goaltenders have to make saves, and the forwards need to stop putting added pressure on the defensemen by not knowing their defensive assignments/responsibilities.
This defense has been playing together for years. Watch the games a little more thoroughly and you can see that a lot of the problems with defensive positioning and turnovers comes from rookie mistakes by young/new forwards in Laviolette's system.
That and Bryzgalov is flat out atrocious in half of his games.
Tell that to Holmgren who is out there trading 2nds for patchwork. I'm not denying the forwards suck defensively, but I can't sit here and tell you this group is fine and dandy moving forward past this year. Kimmo is damn near done, Pronger is done, and three UFAs (two of which probably shouldn't be resigned). Beyond that, we have one guy who can be a decent 3/4 and another who has only really shined in the past when he was playing on the third pairing.
Which goes back to what I said. While time may work in favor of the forwards, it works against the defense. The defensive group is going to need an overhaul much like the forwards received last offseason.
And, yeah. The goaltending is still an issue and has potential to be that way for a long time.
In my first post I wanted to address our personnel and the inconsistencies that lay within our lineup.
Now I want do talk about The Identity of this team and Direction. A lot of you brought up that this is a young team and that the amount of rookies we have make it difficult for us to compete on a nightly basis. I agree with that conclusion. You can only expect so much from rookies.
However, the fact that we have so many rookies on this team is a result of our trades and personnel management. We traded two established forwards for a variety of new players including rookies. That was the choice of management. They brought on rookies, they got rid of nodl, and now we are in our current predicament.
We could have played this season with Read, Rinaldo, And Gustaffson as our only rookies to see significant playing time. But we went in a different direction traded Carter and Richards and now we have a much younger and inexperienced team. Ok I can see the point in that direction. What confuses me is the Transactions that go against this "youth movement" Ideology.
The Jagr, and Bryzgalov signings were clearly "Win Now" signings. If we wanted to go with a youth movement we would have developed Bob and Allowed JVR to play on the top line with Giroux. Jagr and Bryz come in and now Bob is in limbo and JVR has been deemed expendable. Now add on top of it the trading away of draft picks for UFA defenseman.
So as a fan Im confused, are we trying to win now or are we trying to win in the Future.
This lack of direction and identity by the management is confusing for the fan.
It's a rebuild without them having to admit it's a rebuild. At least that's how I've been justifying it. That clip with homer saying "We don't know if we'll be better or worse, just different" was nonsense from the get go.
That being said, we're right about where most realistic people expected us to be this season, if not better.
I reject the entire premise of this thread. I think you can win by playing attractive, attacking hockey. You just need to run out fewer rookies on the defensive core that aren't prone to bad decisions.
The Flyers have the 3rd most wins in the NHL if you exclude shootout wins. All this while we have been pretty severely hit by injuries. I think this system is fine. Just because you don't like the identity doesn't mean they don't have one.
So we are going to play run and gun and then finger the goalies when they get hung out to dry...
I'd rather just play a defensive system from the start. IMO Lavi hasn't done a good job of adapting to our personnel.
There's no way to implement a defensive game when you have 7 rookies in the lineup. The rookies will make too many mistakes and the next thing you know, their confidence is dead in the water. People can say what they want, but that leads to a potential Hitchcock revolt that happened in 06-07.
You let them play a little run and gun though, you get their confidence up, they'll play hard and as a coach you've won them over so when it comes time to implement the defensive game plan, you've got full buy in.
As for the goaltending, nobody expected it Bryzgalov to be this bad. Now, there's mitigating factors behind Bryzgalov's poor play, but none the less, the goaltending hasn't been there to bail out the forwards or the defense when there's a break down.
I don't think it's all doom and gloom that others make it out to be. This is a good hockey club and it has the potential to be a great club once guys like Schenn and Couturier mature. Obviously there will be some changes in the summer with regards to the defense, but overall, this is still a very good hockey club.
We have an identity. High energy, high scoring offense and an above average defense. The con of our identity is the real flakiness of our goalies... now I made myself hungry .
The Flyers have a pretty clear identity, in my opinion. The real question is whether or not you believe the identity and philosophy can take this team to the Cup.
Philly is an aggressive, attacking, uptempo team. The general premise is that they feel they can generate more scoring chances than the opponent on any given night. The odds say that if you can do this on a consistent enough basis, you will score more goals than the opponent, thus winning more games. Pretty simple, eh?
The problems this year shouldn't come as a surprise to most on these boards. I think most had a pretty good idea we'd struggle a bit defensively by removing Richards and Carter off this roster. Add that to the fact that so many rookies have been in and out of the lineup and you are going to have some significant defensive breakdowns, thus putting more responsibility on defensemen that didn't previously have to clean up those things. Then you lose a HOF defenseman for the season? Yea, it's not hard to figure out why we've had some problems.
As Chris stated, Bryz was supposed to "erase" alot of these breakdowns. He was supposed to make some tough saves while this team transitioned to some younger players up front. Not only has he not made many tough saves, but he's let in an inexcusable amount of soft, back breaking goals. Even if everyone else was playing perfectly, Bryz would still be costing us games. He's been absolutely dreadful, and Bob hasn't been much better.
The system and the identity is fine if we can get adequate goaltending. We aren't getting adequate goaltending right now, which is a major concern given the contract the Flyers handed out to that mental midget in the offseason.
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