Flyers general manager Ron Hextall says the club needs to do some offseason evaluation about its core group of locker room leadership.
Specifically, the club needs to know if this is why the team has looked so radically different game to game throughout this disappointing season.
“I think given the inconsistencies, I think it is something we have to evaluate,” Hextall said. “See where we think it is at.”
The absences of Kimmo Timonen (blood clots) and Scott Hartnell (traded) certainly impacted things. Asked whether that would impact team captain Claude Giroux, Hextall said that’s shared responsibility.
“No, leadership doesn’t come down to one guy anymore,” Hextall said. “Those days are gone. It’s a group. It’s typically your older players.
“Middle-age guys can add to it. It’s five, six, seven guys on a team that typically depend on the bulk of your leadership. Not one guy or three guys for that matter.”
While their playoff hopes died losing in Boston, then being blown out in New Jersey, Hextall said he’s still clinging to hope the Flyers somehow qualify. They are nine points behind the Bruins for the second wild-card spot.
That said, he agreed the Bruins defeat was devastating.
“It’s predictable, but it’s not acceptable,” he said of how the Flyers responded against the Devils after the crushing overtime loss in Boston.
“There’s a big difference. Saturday, the Boston game, it’s disappointing for sure. You come back the next night … we gotta be better than that. That’s the bottom line.
“I evaluate things over the course of the year, not one game. I’m not gonna put too much into the last two games and all of a sudden come to some silly evaluation of where we are based on two games. In saying that, I certainly don’t like it.”
The Flyers played very well in Boston, a team that obviously motivates them. Yet they lost control of their destiny in the final 15 seconds of regulation, lost in OT, then went into Newark, New Jersey, comatose and threw up their hands.
“That’s the thing,” Hextall said. “The frustrating part is that we’ve shown how good we can be and at times we haven’t been very good. That’s the part that’s frustrating because it’s there.”
Does that fall to the players, coaching staff or both?
“That’s on all of us,” Hextall replied. “It’s not one individual or coaches or myself or just the players. That’s collectively. That’s all of us. Gotta take a certain amount of responsibility.”
Hextall also wants to know why the club has had three consecutive seasons in which it started slowly out of the gate.
Craig Berube’s club began this year 1-5. The year before under Peter Laviolette, it was 1-7 — Lavy was fired three games in — and coming out of the lockout, Laviolette’s team went 2-6.
“It’s bothersome because it’s not only the hole you put yourself into, it’s kinda the energy that you create at the start of the year,” Hextall said. “That is something we’ve talked about and we’ll continue to talk about and continue to look at because we’ve got to reverse that trend.
“Getting off to a good start is huge. Again, it’s just the energy that you get among the team in the locker room, the good feeling that you have moving forward right from the start. Again, it’s tough to get out of holes.”
Hextall wonders whether going away at the middle or very end of training camp has done more harm than good.
“One thing that I do know is our team’s been away before the season started and quite frankly, I’ve already thought about that,” he said.
“Do we go away again or do we stay home? I don’t know. Going away, you like the thought. You keep your players together for a few days and build a little bit of camaraderie before the season. It hasn’t worked. It’s one of the things I’ve thought about already. Maybe we’ve got to change that.”