First - great article! It was very well written and articulate! Better than the vast majority of stuff I see online.
Thank you, I appreciate it! I started a little site to get writing out about the franchise but my own personal life has stunted that for the last month—finally got more on the way though.
The Flyers are one of the most fascinating teams in sports because they're essentially an empty corporate husk trading on their own distant past. Under Snider they were a standard of consistent contention. Snider also invented the first regional sports network and helped pioneer sports talk radio, so the Flyers kinda wrote the book on marketing and narrative-building in a local sports market.
Snider divested and then died and now the guys at the very top are faceless corporate executives who don't know anything about hockey. So the Comcast executives just defer hockey decisions to whatever ex-players have hung around the office. Which meant that many years after he was fired, Bob Clarke was still able to install his ex-protege, Chuck Fletcher, as GM.
When all that blew up, Comcast just fired the last outsider executive and hired a new one who handed the keys to a
younger generation of ex-Flyers who hung around the office. Hence, Jones and Briere.
The Flyers constantly find themselves in these confusing player controversies because they're run by people who probably aren't qualified for the jobs they hold, and can't be held accountable because their own bosses don't understand that. Yet because they have entirely controlled their own local media for 45 years, a lot of fans are more than willing to embrace the TUFF, GRITTY, PLAY THE RIGHT WAY bullshit they sell and chalk all their failures and drama up to "Agh, this franchise is cursed! Such bad luck!"
Long-winded way to say: it's a fascinating franchise to write about from a management/corporate perspective. The guy that Snider hand-selected to be his heir, by the way, quit the company when Comcast took over. He then became *Chairman of the Florida Panthers and helped set them up for their transition to contention.
On the above paragraph - I might be giving CG too much credit but I try to see what might have happened behind the scenes that would explain how people react. To me, Briere "screwing" CG by going the AHL PTO route instead of burning a year off his ELC has a HUGE negative financial impact to CG. If Fletcher promised to burn a year on ELC and Briere reneged on the that, that kills the relationship and everything makes sense after that. It also makes the Flyers organized media campaign that much more despicable to try and cover their own ass.
Well, exactly. Think what you want about the player, but these are massive financial decisions for a player to make. One year less of ELC means one more year of your career earning millions down the road. And also, since your career can end at any second at the college level or even below, getting some guaranteed money for your labor as soon as possible makes sense. If Gauthier goes unsigned and then breaks his neck in his sophomore season at BC, his entire life's worth of training is for nothing—he won't see a dime from the game.
Acting like it's entitled or immature for a player to place priority on actually earning money for the dangerous sport they play is some really glib fan bullshit. This is a business. But, the
billionaires who own sports teams are incredibly good at convincing fans that the
millionaires who play the sports are loathsome greedy brats any time they ask for a piece of the pie.
Anyway. Johanson.
