Rumor: Things Not Left Unsaid 2, More Flyers Rumors & Media Mentions: Say It Like You Mean It

[Beef Invictus]

To the bolded: exactly what I am saying. There is no model that can account for it. It is why so many teams fail. If there was a model to follow everyone would follow it.

To the "luck" correlating with competence. Please elaborate. Let's look at the last few champs:

Vegas: This is a weird one given the way they got there and clearly is not something anyone can replicate given the circumstances but it was great management that got them there, just not something that will ever be possible again (see: Seattle)

Colorado: Three top five picks on that roster, plus a top ten pick. Curious how they got those guys? Probably wasn't because they were at the bottom of the standings, right? Probably also a good thing they got that #1 pick when it was MacKinnon and not the year before when it was Yakupov. Great management decision.

TB: This actually may be the best example of a team that is consistently well run, although they did have guys like Stammer and Hedman on the team so there was some suckiness but that was relatively short-lived compared to their success. But again...they don't to where they are without those two and in order to get those two you have to suck and suck at the right time.

STL: They had Pietrangelo as a top five pick on that team, but also looking at how the team was built it looks like they were relatively poor at drafting and traded a lot of draft picks (and had a coach that I believe everyone on here wasn't/isn't a good coach), which is something that I assume people would be pretty upset about. They also got unexpected God-level play out of Binnington that he has never been able to replicate.

After that it is all Caps, Red Wings, Pens, Kings, and Blackhawks which we don't need to get into because we know how they got there.

What do these teams have in common? They all sucked enough to get at least one top five pick (most of which had multiple and at least 1 first overall) and they sucked at the right time that the players available who were at the top of the draft weren't Nolan Patrick or Nail Yakupov or Patrik Stefan or JvR. It's almost like, you know, there's somethings that you can't account for that have a bigger impact than the things you can account for.

They all followed up their "good luck" with additional competence that created success, usually after changing how they operate. That's why they're "lucky" and teams like Buffalo and Philly aren't. And nobody would describe Edmonton as lucky.

A huge degree of "luck" is the result of a good processes.

 

[DrinkFightFlyers]

They all followed up their "good luck" with additional competence that created success, usually after changing how they operate. That's why they're "lucky" and teams like Buffalo and Philly aren't. And nobody would describe Edmonton as lucky.

A huge degree of "luck" is the result of a good processes.

#1, I agree. But you don't get to the "additional competence" until you get the years of incompetence and the luck.

And I disagree a lot with the Buffalo and Philly comparison. Buffalo and Philly aren't unlucky because their management sucks (though that also is certainly a factor), they are unlucky because of their luck. I don't care who your GM was when they drafted Nolan Patrick. You can't account for what happened to him. I don't care who your GM is if you have the worst record and worst year in franchise history and the #1 pick is an elite superstar talent and you lose the lottery and have to choose from mediocrity. You can't account for that. If the Flyers get Kane that likely changes the entire trajectory of the franchise. If the Blackhawks get someone other than Kane their entire trajectory changes. If the Flyers suck one year later they may wind up with Stamkos or Doughty. And so forth and so on. If you think that this "luck" is the result of good processes you are sorely mistaken.

Of course, you do need to make the right picks, etc. and do the right stuff AFTER the luck, but you don't get there without the luck first. It's a lot easier to build a team around McDavid and Draisaitl, Malkin and Crosby, Kane and Towes, Stammer and Hedman, Ovechkin and Backstrom, and so forth and so on. And you don't get those guys without #1 sucking and #2 luck. You'll notice those guys didn't come in at the end of the line, they were there (you guessed it) before the teams turned things around! I wonder if the Penguins would have had the same success they had if they had picks 4, 3, and 2 in the years they got Malkin, Fleury, and Crosby? They probably look a lot different with Zherdev, Barker, and Bobby Ryan. It's really weird and almost like things like sucking at the right time and getting the right lottery bounces have HUGE impacts on teams ability to turn themselves around. But probably not.

 

[FlyerNutter]

A smart team puts themselves into a position to draft high for a few seasons - and can avoid the whole “luck” thing.

Advisors of stupid teams whine years later about how their scouts wanted someone else the one year they had a top pick.

Flyers are just too arrogant of a franchise to ever rebuild properly.

 

[Beef Invictus]

#1, I agree. But you don't get to the "additional competence" until you get the years of incompetence and the luck.

And I disagree a lot with the Buffalo and Philly comparison. Buffalo and Philly aren't unlucky because their management sucks (though that also is certainly a factor), they are unlucky because of their luck. I don't care who your GM was when they drafted Nolan Patrick. You can't account for what happened to him. I don't care who your GM is if you have the worst record and worst year in franchise history and the #1 pick is an elite superstar talent and you lose the lottery and have to choose from mediocrity. You can't account for that. If the Flyers get Kane that likely changes the entire trajectory of the franchise. If the Blackhawks get someone other than Kane their entire trajectory changes. If the Flyers suck one year later they may wind up with Stamkos or Doughty. And so forth and so on. If you think that this "luck" is the result of good processes you are sorely mistaken.

Of course, you do need to make the right picks, etc. and do the right stuff AFTER the luck, but you don't get there without the luck first. It's a lot easier to build a team around McDavid and Draisaitl, Malkin and Crosby, Kane and Towes, Stammer and Hedman, Ovechkin and Backstrom, and so forth and so on. And you don't get those guys without #1 sucking and #2 luck. You'll notice those guys didn't come in at the end of the line, they were there (you guessed it) before the teams turned things around! I wonder if the Penguins would have had the same success they had if they had picks 4, 3, and 2 in the years they got Malkin, Fleury, and Crosby? They probably look a lot different with Zherdev, Barker, and Bobby Ryan. It's really weird and almost like things like sucking at the right time and getting the right lottery bounces have HUGE impacts on teams ability to turn themselves around. But probably not.

My thing about Patrick is, the reason his loss is so crippling, is that because of incompetence across the board there's simply no other options in the pipeline. It makes the "bad luck" feel worse. Competence is a luck multiplier, is what I'm trying to say

 

[DrinkFightFlyers]

My thing about Patrick is, the reason his loss is so crippling, is that because of incompetence across the board there's simply no other options in the pipeline. It makes the "bad luck" feel worse. Competence is a luck multiplier, is what I'm trying to say

Well sure you still need to make the right moves the Patrick pick should have been a plus in the luck column but it turned into a minus. Again, there's a lot of revisionist history and it has been discussed ad nauseum, but Patrick was ALWAYS going to be that pick regardless of who was picking there and regardless of what Bobby Clarke said. That was seven years ago and really the only objectively bad picks since then in the first round were JOB. There's definitely some debatable picks and picks I wouldn't have made or you wouldn't have made, but other than JOB there hasn't been any that are objectively bad in the first round. There's bad trades and contracts for sure, but you also have a lot of bad luck strewn in there.

The Michkov pick could be one of those "good luck" picks. Same thing if Fedotov or one of the other million goalies we have drafted or signed turns out to be a stud. Getting out of the cap crunch we're in right now will do wonders for accumulating assets and in a few years if we get those lucky bounces we'll be in a good spot. If we suck this year and lose the lottery and Michkov has a career ending injury guess what, that's not Briere's fault. Rub those rabbit's feet kids!

 

[Random Forest]

I don’t want to overemphasize the “luck” point, but the Crosby situation really should be the case-in-point here. They were terrible, yes. They put themselves in a position to be rewarded, yes. But had Anaheim’s ping pong ball come out of the machine in 2005, the entire TWENTY YEAR trajectory of the Penguins is different, and likely a cautionary story of a miserable, pathetic franchise.

Instead, they got Sidney Crosby and twenty years of relative success.

Obviously they are not the typical case, and yes, good teams have been and can be built through real competence, but the point is that these things are not deterministic at all. Obviously the Flyers have been horribly mismanaged. But in the cap era, zero teams have gotten where they were without a massive degree of luck. The Flyers could have the best process in the world, and would still need massive luck for it to work out.

There’s a universe where Buffalo wins McDavid. And one where Chicago doesn’t win Kane. Or Colorado ends up with Nolan Patrick. Imagine what those universes look like. All the stuff that we associate with those management teams would be very very different, with absolutely no deliberate change in their intentions, strategies, or quality of management.

I do think this was very different before the cap where it mattered less to have superstars on ELCs and RFA deals. But the current NHL is highly random, and the extent you can control the Really Big Things is quite limited.

 

[Beef Invictus]

Well sure you still need to make the right moves the Patrick pick should have been a plus in the luck column but it turned into a minus. Again, there's a lot of revisionist history and it has been discussed ad nauseum, but Patrick was ALWAYS going to be that pick regardless of who was picking there and regardless of what Bobby Clarke said. That was seven years ago and really the only objectively bad picks since then in the first round were JOB. There's definitely some debatable picks and picks I wouldn't have made or you wouldn't have made, but other than JOB there hasn't been any that are objectively bad in the first round. There's bad trades and contracts for sure, but you also have a lot of bad luck strewn in there.

The Michkov pick could be one of those "good luck" picks. Same thing if Fedotov or one of the other million goalies we have drafted or signed turns out to be a stud. Getting out of the cap crunch we're in right now will do wonders for accumulating assets and in a few years if we get those lucky bounces we'll be in a good spot. If we suck this year and lose the lottery and Michkov has a career ending injury guess what, that's not Briere's fault. Rub those rabbit's feet kids!

There's a lot of emphasis on Michkov being luck, and it is (just like Couturier and TK dropping), but they still had to be competent enough to roll the dice on taking them all when clearly many other hockey minds weren't. Even when luck presents itself, it takes competency to capitalize on it

 

[sregdoor]

I don’t want to overemphasize the “luck” point, but the Crosby situation really should be the case-in-point here. They were terrible, yes. They put themselves in a position to be rewarded, yes. But had Anaheim’s ping pong ball come out of the machine in 2005, the entire TWENTY YEAR trajectory of the Penguins is different, and likely a cautionary story of a miserable, pathetic franchise.

Instead, they got Sidney Crosby and twenty years of relative success.

Obviously they are not the typical case, and yes, good teams have been and can be built through real competence, but the point is that these things are not deterministic at all. Obviously the Flyers have been horribly mismanaged. But in the cap era, zero teams have gotten where they were without a massive degree of luck. The Flyers could have the best process in the world, and would still need massive luck for it to work out.

There’s a universe where Buffalo wins McDavid. And one where Chicago doesn’t win Kane. Or Colorado ends up with Nolan Patrick. Imagine what those universes look like. All the stuff that we associate with those management teams would be very very different, with absolutely no deliberate change in their intentions, strategies, or quality of management.

I do think this was very different before the cap where it mattered less to have superstars on ELCs and RFA deals. But the current NHL is highly random, and the extent you can control the Really Big Things is quite limited.

Buffalo would have somehow screwed up McDavid if they had won that lottery. I don't trust Bettman and feel the Crosby lottery was fixed. Pittsburgh was barely holding on at that time. The draft pick sold tickets and helped steady the franchise. Edmonton gets McDavid in the 2015 draft a year before the Rogers Place opens. Sorry growing up in the 60s has left me seeing conspiracies all over the place, along with a slight distaste for Bettman.

 

[Curufinwe]

The NHL isn't run for the benefit of Edmonton lol

The league would have been a billion dollars better off rigging the lottery to put McDavid in Philly.

 

[DrinkFightFlyers]

There's a lot of emphasis on Michkov being luck, and it is (just like Couturier and TK dropping), but they still had to be competent enough to roll the dice on taking them all when clearly many other hockey minds weren't. Even when luck presents itself, it takes competency to capitalize on it

Getting Couturier or TK is not the kind of luck I am talking about. Those guys are the complimentary players to the "luck" type of players. The luck players are the guys that are no-brainers that you literally can't screw up. The McDavids and Crosbys and OV and Stamkos of the world. Look at the 2022 draft. Obviously time will tell on that but getting Slafkovsky probably isn't going to change the course of the Habs franchise moving forward. He's got a season and a half of good production but he isn't lighting the world on fire. The luck you need is getting that home run superstar which has a lot to do #1 with first being a bad team to be in a position to get that guy and #2 that guy actually existing in that draft. It doesn't matter who your GM is or who your coach is if Crosby or Ovechkin or McDavid etc. are there at #1 or #2. The whole world know who you are taking.

As for Couturier and TK being there and getting picked, they aren't franchise changing cornerstones like the previously mentioned guys in my earlier posts. They're good players and two of the best players we have had in a while, but I am talking about regular Hart Trophy contenders. And yes those were good picks and the types of picks that we would need and will need moving forward, but those picks are meaningless as we have seen without the other type of luck coupled with the bad management. If those picks were McDavid and Draisaitl I'm pretty confident that the Flyers would be in a much better position than they are today regardless of who we have at the helm.

Michkov could be a franchise changing prospect and years from now we could be looking back pointing this out as the luck we needed. Or he gets sent to the gulag and we never know. Or he comes over and is just a typical top ten pick who is good not great. There's a lot of unknown and uncontrollable things that will happen between now and then.

 

[Beef Invictus]

Getting Couturier or TK is not the kind of luck I am talking about. Those guys are the complimentary players to the "luck" type of players. The luck players are the guys that are no-brainers that you literally can't screw up. The McDavids and Crosbys and OV and Stamkos of the world. Look at the 2022 draft. Obviously time will tell on that but getting Slafkovsky probably isn't going to change the course of the Habs franchise moving forward. He's got a season and a half of good production but he isn't lighting the world on fire. The luck you need is getting that home run superstar which has a lot to do #1 with first being a bad team to be in a position to get that guy and #2 that guy actually existing in that draft. It doesn't matter who your GM is or who your coach is if Crosby or Ovechkin or McDavid etc. are there at #1 or #2. The whole world know who you are taking.

As for Couturier and TK being there and getting picked, they aren't franchise changing cornerstones like the previously mentioned guys in my earlier posts. They're good players and two of the best players we have had in a while, but I am talking about regular Hart Trophy contenders. And yes those were good picks and the types of picks that we would need and will need moving forward, but those picks are meaningless as we have seen without the other type of luck coupled with the bad management. If those picks were McDavid and Draisaitl I'm pretty confident that the Flyers would be in a much better position than they are today regardless of who we have at the helm.

Michkov could be a franchise changing prospect and years from now we could be looking back pointing this out as the luck we needed. Or he gets sent to the gulag and we never know. Or he comes over and is just a typical top ten pick who is good not great. There's a lot of unknown and uncontrollable things that will happen between now and then.

But now we circle back to them only being considered lucky because solid management afterwards capitalized on them. Buffalo was lucky to get Eichel. And yet for a while it was insisted they weren't lucky because it was thought he was overrated or a bust, due to terrible management.

Guys in TB, Pitt, Colorado, and WAS were all classified as flashy chokers until better management kicked in. After that it became "how lucky!"

 

[ponder719]

The NHL isn't run for the benefit of Edmonton lol

The league would have been a billion dollars better off rigging the lottery to put McDavid in Philly.

Exactly. If the NHL was rigging that draft, Edmonton is probably team #13 or 14 out of 14 they'd rig it for. If you're treating the Devils as New Jersey, #1 with a bullet is LA (who obviously doesn't trade the pick to Boston if they win.) Philly's probably top 5, in the mix with Boston, Florida, and Dallas. Maybe Toronto, but there's only so much the league gets out of sending him to a Canadian club.

If you treat the Devils as a NYC club, then put them up there ahead of the Kings, move everyone else down 1.

 

[Curufinwe]

If the Flyers had got McDavid they should have changed the schedule to have 5 or 6 Pit-Philly games a season.

 

[BritainStix]

I really f***ing hope Michov is as good as he's being hyped to me, because God damn do we need a break as flyers fans.

 

[renberg]

I really f***ing hope Michov is as good as he's being hyped to me, because God damn do we need a break as flyers fans.

Let’s give the guy a chance. Putting too much on his shoulders too soon could bury him. I’m afraid that some folks are going to immediately expect a Lindros type impact out of him. That’s not fair to him. Right now he doesn’t have a center on the roster that he could work with who could help take advantage of his abilities.

 

[Schwarbomb]

Let’s give the guy a chance. Putting too much on his shoulders too soon could bury him. I’m afraid that some folks are going to immediately expect a Lindros type impact out of him. That’s not fair to him. Right now he doesn’t have a center on the roster that he could work with who could help take advantage of his abilities.

He doesn't have a coaching staff to take advantage of his abilities either.

 

[Flyerfan4life]

Let’s give the guy a chance. Putting too much on his shoulders too soon could bury him. I’m afraid that some folks are going to immediately expect a Lindros type impact out of him. That’s not fair to him. Right now he doesn’t have a center on the roster that he could work with who could help take advantage of his abilities.

dont worry it wont be fans that crush MM! its gunna be Torts ...

he will strip him of his natural skillset and force him to play honest grinder hockey

 

[Hextallent63]

Again, that "luck" very strongly tends to correlate with competence, which suggests it isn't truly luck.

Boston of the 2000s isn't a replicable model. Hoping for a once-in-franchise-history streak of fortune isn't a good model.

You have to do things to put yourself in a position to reap the benefits of a string of luck. Doing things right, maximizing draft picks/draft capital, having smart practices in place that is the norm organizationally, developing to strengths, and drafting high skill types with highest ceilings as opposed to drafting players the way the flyers do. If you have 20 picks in one draft every one should be used to draft based on ceiling. The flyers don't do this. They draft thinking, "this guy is going to be a good third line player, or this guy's got a high motor and tries his hardest.

They all followed up their "good luck" with additional competence that created success, usually after changing how they operate. That's why they're "lucky" and teams like Buffalo and Philly aren't. And nobody would describe Edmonton as lucky.

A huge degree of "luck" is the result of a good processes.

You can kind of put Vegas in this position but it is a little different, Tampa Bay, Florida are two examples of teams that had home runs in the draft but also added major pieces of their teams through the hard work of a good GM

 

[Hextallent63]

My thing about Patrick is, the reason his loss is so crippling, is that because of incompetence across the board there's simply no other options in the pipeline. It makes the "bad luck" feel worse. Competence is a luck multiplier, is what I'm trying to say

It's been mentioned over and over again but the top 15 in Patrick's draft was really strong and with his injury history they could have picked someone else. And I guarantee you they knew about his head problems

 

[Hextallent63]

Buffalo would have somehow screwed up McDavid if they had won that lottery. I don't trust Bettman and feel the Crosby lottery was fixed. Pittsburgh was barely holding on at that time. The draft pick sold tickets and helped steady the franchise. Edmonton gets McDavid in the 2015 draft a year before the Rogers Place opens. Sorry growing up in the 60s has left me seeing conspiracies all over the place, along with a slight distaste for Bettman.

conspiracies and common sense are very close

 

[Hextallent63]

I don’t want to overemphasize the “luck” point, but the Crosby situation really should be the case-in-point here. They were terrible, yes. They put themselves in a position to be rewarded, yes. But had Anaheim’s ping pong ball come out of the machine in 2005, the entire TWENTY YEAR trajectory of the Penguins is different, and likely a cautionary story of a miserable, pathetic franchise.

Instead, they got Sidney Crosby and twenty years of relative success.

Obviously they are not the typical case, and yes, good teams have been and can be built through real competence, but the point is that these things are not deterministic at all. Obviously the Flyers have been horribly mismanaged. But in the cap era, zero teams have gotten where they were without a massive degree of luck. The Flyers could have the best process in the world, and would still need massive luck for it to work out.

There’s a universe where Buffalo wins McDavid. And one where Chicago doesn’t win Kane. Or Colorado ends up with Nolan Patrick. Imagine what those universes look like. All the stuff that we associate with those management teams would be very very different, with absolutely no deliberate change in their intentions, strategies, or quality of management.

I do think this was very different before the cap where it mattered less to have superstars on ELCs and RFA deals. But the current NHL is highly random, and the extent you can control the Really Big Things is quite limited.

This really pisses me off because it reminds me of us getting Lindros and it ending up bad him leaving and his career getting cut short because of the incompetence of the organization. It really does go back that far.

He doesn't have a coaching staff to take advantage of his abilities either.

He doesn't have an organization..

 

[renberg]

Some talk around Columbus that they will let the Flyers have the second round pick due them this year. That way it will clear their skate to make a move with the ‘25 second rounder.

 

[volnoir]

Some talk around Columbus that they will let the Flyers have the second round pick due them this year. That way it will clear their skate to make a move with the ‘25 second rounder.

Why not just trade the 24 second rounder? I guess if they were going to make a move post draft that wouldn't work. Would be nice if we got theirs this year though.

 

[FLYguy3911]

https://x.com/i/web/status/1802000732947710095

 

[dgaspari]

The Flyers need to take a home run swing and be creative in their approach to rebuilding. my suggestion:

approach Carolina and offer Ristolainen for a cap dump,
Kkaotniemi. neither side will retain any salaries. Carolina dumps 28M in salaries plus 6 years of a contract and picks up $15M and 3 years of his contract for a net savings of $13M in salaries and 3 contract years.

Carolina, which could lose 3 UFA defensemen, picks up an experienced blueliner. The Hurricanes are a playoff team and at the trade deadline, those teams are always looking for a physical right-handed. Carolina gets their need early.

This is a win-win for them.

The Flyers get a young talented player in Kkaotniemi. there are no cap consequences in the first two years since his salary match with Ristolainen. if Jasper turns out to be a top-six player, the Flyers have him on a below-average contract. if he turns out to be a bust after 2 years, the Flyers can buy him out. Because of his age, the buyout is only 33% or $6.8 M, a similar amount to Risto's contract in his final year. (I understand there are some accounting differences on the buy out)

this is an ideal situation for the Flyers
they lose the Risto contract.
they take a homerun swing on a young talented player.
if they are wrong, they can correct the situation with no complication so their salary cap