O'Connor: It's time for doubters to acknowledge that Flyers' rebuild plan isn't certain to fail

Go on social media, or message boards, or comment sections, and you’ll find quite a few fans of the Philadelphia Flyers who still simply don’t trust the front office’s plan to return the club to prominence.

Perhaps the number isn’t as high as it may at times seem. This group does tend to be especially vocal, which can drown out all of those who have watched the Flyers’ surprising 2023-24 campaign and are very much onboard with what general manager Daniel Briere, president of hockey operations Keith Jones, and the rest of the Philadelphia brain trust are selling.

But the doubters are there. They’re real. And in spite of the club’s resurgence in the wake of three consecutive dismal on-ice seasons, they remain either extremely skeptical of or utterly convinced that the Flyers are on the wrong track.

And it’s high time for those doubters to take a step back and reevaluate whether they’re truly being fair to the Flyers in reflexively railing against a rebuilding plan flush with promising early returns. A rebuilding plan that, while not certain to succeed — no plan is — it certainly has the potential to do so.

There are two lingering critiques of the Flyers’ plan: one that can be quickly dismissed, and one that deserves serious inspection.

The first is that Briere has been selling the fans a bill of goods, that he promised a rebuild and now is disingenuously pivoting to more of a middle-ground “retool.” But for those who have paid attention to Briere’s words and actions from the start, this criticism is nonsense. The Flyers have laid out their plan from the start, and have been remarkably transparent regarding their overarching philosophy.

In fact, on the very first full day of Briere’s tenure, when he was still interim GM, he made one key distinction clear: the Flyers would be rebuilding, yes, but they would not be tanking. The specific term he used was “fire sale,” but the sentiment was unmistakable — Briere had never promised a scorched-earth style rebuild. Then, in the wake of Briere’s first trade deadline last week, he clearly articulated one of the driving motivators behind avoiding a fire sale, when explaining why he chose to re-sign Nick Seeler and keep Scott Laughton: the importance of a strong, competitive culture upon player development and the overall success of the rebuild.

Briere and Co. have long believed this. There has been no pivot, no betrayal of past promises. This has always been their plan.

The second critique — that the Flyers’ chosen rebuilding plan simply won’t work in constructing a consistent Stanley Cup contender — is at least worthy of consideration.

The gist of the critique is simple. In this group’s estimation, aside from Matvei Michkov, the Flyers don’t have high-end, star-level players or ones with the upside to hit that level in the future. The best way to acquire high-end players is via the top-10 of the draft, yet the Flyers refuse to bottom out in order to make multiple selections there. Therefore, their plan is unlikely to produce anything more than a middle-of-the-pack club, since all of the top Cup contenders have not just one, but multiple gamechangers at the top of their lineups.

The Flyers, for their part, freely acknowledge the team’s need for more high-end talent. John Tortorella has noted the need for the club to produce via a by-committee approach due to the team’s dearth of superstars. Briere said the same back in December when speaking with PHLY, and reiterated it on Saturday’s Flyers-Lightning broadcast. Jones openly stated during his interview with PHLY in January that the Flyers as currently constituted don’t have the ceiling of clubs like Colorado due to the talent discrepancy at the top of their respective lineups, which plays into why the front office isn’t “going for it” just yet in terms of spending prime assets to chase down playoff wins.

But this honesty, in a way, just makes the doubters more angry. You know what the team lacks, they rail, yet you are purposely choosing to spurn the strategy most likely to solve the problem. No wonder why this contingent is so frustrated all the time.

But does the Flyers’ chosen path really make securing high-end talent impossible?

There are four ways, really, for a team to add top-end players.

1. Draft in the top-10 a bunch of years in a row.
2. Get lucky drafting outside the top-10.
3. Accumulate assets, clear out cap space, & then trade for/sign them when available.
4. Help existing roster players (or acquired reclamation projects) take leaps into stardom.

Drafting regularly in the top-10 isn’t the only way to get stars — it’s just the most straightforward. And yes, removing potential top-10 picks from the equation requires fans to have faith that Briere and Co. will make the right draft picks later on and/or execute on the right trades. But is it so difficult to believe that they could?

It’s not like every current Cup contender was built by bottoming out. There’s Dallas, a club with just one top-10 pick over the past ten years that constructed its roster around fantastic value drafting (Jason Robertson, Roope Hintz, Jake Oettinger) and shrewd free agent signings (Joe Pavelski, Matt Duchene). And then there’s defending champion Vegas, who lacked high-end talent to start but stockpiled assets to use to acquire stars via trade (Jack Eichel, Mark Stone) and free agency (Alex Pietrangelo).

There’s more than one way to put together a championship-caliber team.

And even if the Flyers had gone with the fire sale/tank strategy, that wouldn’t have been a foolproof strategy, either. Sure, after picking in the top-10 for five straight seasons, there wouldn’t be many doubters screaming that the Flyers lack young players with top-of-the-lineup upside. But there would be reason to worry that those high-upside guys would suffer through rocky developmental years absent sufficient teammate support on a gutted roster.

There’s precedent here. Buffalo, of course, drafted in the top-10 for ten straight years from 2013 through 2022 and still hasn’t been able to build a winning team — top picks like Rasmus Ristolainen and Sam Reinhart didn’t deliver their best seasons until after leaving the organization. Ottawa is loaded with exciting U25 players and continues to disappoint. Detroit had top-10 picks for seven straight years, and is just finally hoping to squeak into the postseason this season, while still getting bulldozed nightly at 5-on-5 (29th in the NHL by expected goal share). Even New Jersey, held up last season as an example of the merits of tanking (four top-10 picks in five years, including two first overall selections), has crashed back to earth this season.

All of these teams have talent — high-end talent. But none have been able to coalesce it into anything remotely resembling a sustainable title contender. Is it possible that the Flyers might be onto something here with their emphasis on team culture being essential to proper player development? Buffalo and Ottawa fans certainly would be open to the argument.

That’s not to say that tanking can’t work. The Avalanche, of course, are loaded with top-10 picks. Toronto’s turnaround was fueled by the Matthews/Marner/Nylander/Rielly group — all blue-chippers selected at the top of their respective drafts. Tampa Bay’s decade-long run of excellence began with the two core players — Steven Stamkos & Victor Hedman — that they nabbed with top-five picks.

But it’s not a strategy destined to succeed, either. Team building isn’t merely about acquiring the most young players with the highest ceilings. It’s about having the ability to mold them into stars that can carry your club. Had the Flyers chosen a tanking strategy, it wouldn’t have been a panacea to skepticism — it simply would have changed the nature of that skepticism.

Yes, the “how will you get high-end talent?” question is a viable and important one for the Flyers to face. But the question shouldn’t be deployed as a debate-ender, an exposé of how clueless the front office’s plan truly is. It instead should be presented sincerely, as an “OK, there’s good things going on here, but how will you acquire the big pieces to put you over the top?” query.

Of course, the obvious problem is that Briere and Jones and the Flyers simply can’t answer that question in a satisfying way right now.

If they have their eyes on a specific trade or UFA target, they’d be foolish to reveal it to the rest of the league until they actually acquire him.

Saying “we’re also going to trust that if we give our scouts enough opportunities, they can unearth a Jason Robertson (39th overall pick) or David Pastrňák (25th overall) or Sebastian Aho (35th) or Josh Morrissey (13th) or Brayden Point (79th) or Anze Kopitar (11th)” will only be met with eye rolls from skeptics — even if those kinds of draft wins do happen frequently.

Even contending that all of Tyson Foerster (on pace for 20+ goals and driving play at 5-on-5 in the 85th percentile among forwards by xG impact as a 22-year old rookie), Joel Farabee (ranked 22nd among NHL forwards in 5-on-5 Points/60 and delivering the best play-driving season of his career), Jamie Drysdale and Owen Tippett could plausibly take further steps in coming seasons and establish themselves as star-level talents can easily be dismissed as organizational wishful thinking, even if it remains a potential outcome for all of them, given the promising statistical signs (Foerster and Farabee) and exciting physical tools (Drysdale and Tippett) that they do legitimately possess.

Which brings us to the real sticking point here.

A full-throated endorsement of the Flyers’ plan does require a leap of faith. A belief that the people in charge will ultimately execute the right trades, or unearth the right draftees, or pursue the best development strategies. The loudest skeptics simply aren’t ready to take that leap after years of organizational incompetence, believing that only drafting in the top-10 can work, because uber-talented early picks are likely to emerge as stars even if the people calling the shots are fools.

But here’s the thing: That would be willfully ignoring all of the positive developments from the past year, all of the early, promising signs that the front office is not filled with fools, that their plan truly could work as they envision.

The Flyers have pulled off four significant reclamation projects — Tippett, Seeler, Sean Walker and Rasmus Ristolainen — over the past two seasons, speaking to this being a true organizational talent and not merely good luck.

They’ve stockpiled four first round picks and four second round picks over the next two drafts, speaking to the front office’s ability to successfully accumulate prime assets.

They’ve gotten all of Farabee, Travis Sanheim, Morgan Frost and even Travis Konecny (his two-way 5-on-5 work has improved tremendously in 2023-24) to take big statistical leaps this season, speaking to a newfound knack for pushing established NHLers to new heights.

They’ve successfully integrated all of Foerster, Cam York and Noah Cates into the NHL as clearly above-average players over the past two seasons, with Foerster and Cates in particular excelling by advanced metrics, speaking to improvements in player development, especially at the NHL level.

They’ve drafted what so far appears to be an excellent 2023 class, with Michkov, Oliver Bonk, Denver Barkey and Egor Zavragin in particular all delivering monster Draft+1 campaigns, speaking to a sound prospect evaulation process.

They stuck to their guns in prioritizing a long-term plan over short-term gratification in trading Walker for futures even while sitting in a playoff spot, speaking to the front office’s newly resolute nature.

Oh, and the NHL team is still pushing for that aforementioned playoff spot, and driving play at 5-on-5 while doing it, speaking to the quality of their underlying on-ice process and the strength of the team’s internal locker room culture.

Dismissing all of these undeniably positive signs is the fan equivalent of sticking one’s head in the sand. It’s pure stubbornness to continue to cling to a previous stance in the face of overwhelming evidence that circumstances are not nearly as dire and dismal as they once were.

Why not open your mind to the possibility that the Flyers just might be onto something here?

No one is saying that skepticism should be jettisoned entirely. There are plenty of ways this plan could go off the rails — the drafts might go south, Briere could make misguided trades (or no trades at all), Michkov might (gasp) bust or never come to North America. One can reasonably disagree on Morgan Frost or Bobby Brink’s game-over-game usage by Tortorella, or whether it was right to re-sign Nick Seeler, or if it’s wise to bet on Travis Konecny aging like a fine wine into his mid-30s by giving him a lucrative long-term extension this summer. Fan (and media) criticism serves to hold a front office accountable, and that will always be a good thing.

But the Flyers are nailing their reclamation projects. They’re stockpiling assets. Their young-ish NHL players are taking steps forward. Their prospects are emerging as useful NHLers, if not far more than that. Their drafting has been on point. They fought the temptation to take team-building shortcuts. And the NHL club is playing legitimately sound, solid hockey again.

It’s high time for the most vocal doubters to acknowledge that Briere and Co. have earned just a little benefit of the doubt via their work and results over the past season. Maybe, just maybe, you should consider giving it to them.