Should Flyers' Struggles Raise Questions Of Tocchet's Future As Head Coach?

There basically isn't a statistic that makes the Philadelphia Flyers look even halfway decent through the first seven games of the season.

As of Sunday afternoon's regulation loss to the Carolina Hurricanes, the Flyers were 0-5-2 with the worst numbers in the league in the following categories: goal share, shot share, and expected-goals share. Both at 5-on-5 and in all situations.

That goals-for number (outscored 28-8 across those seven games) comes with the Flyers getting middle-of-the-pack goaltending in all situations.

So it could, in fact, be worse.

Maybe we should have seen it coming. After all, the Flyers' success last season was largely predicated on Dan Vladar, a perfectly fine journeyman but little more posting a top-10 goals-saved above expected (13.8, in the same neighborhood as guys like Alex Lyon and Joel Hofer), while fighting through a weak division.

They knew they had roster deficiencies, too — so much so that they were willing to blow up the NHL's entire salary structure to try to sign Leo Carlsson. The fact that they didn't pursue anybody after that was tantamount to running up the white flag.

When GM Daniel Briere is telling local reporters that they "warned" fans the team is still young and that there's a certain amount of ups and downs that come with that, he's not wrong. That he then told them it's "not the time to panic," that's harder to swallow.

If it were an 0-5-2 start and they were playing well, that would be one thing. Young teams — and by the way, the Flyers are only the 10th-youngest team in the league; the Rangers are younger, for example — make mistakes that older teams would be able to recover from.

Sure. But when your goal differential is in the 20s and your expected-goal share is in the 30s, you can't just say, "Well, Porter Martone is a rookie." The guys who aren't performing on this team, like Rasmus Ristolainen, Owen Tippett, Dan Vladar, Travis Sanheim, Tyson Foerster, and Sean Couturier are all in their age-25 season, or older.

Even Foerster, who has scored one of the Flyers' eight goals this season but has otherwise struggled, is in his fourth year in the league. He can't credibly claim to be too new to all this.

Ultimately, it falls on the coach to get a team ready for a season, a road trip, or any given game. Rick Tocchet has clearly not done that, but the many veterans on this team haven't done very much either. Where does the blame for that lie?

And yes, the schedule has been difficult — four of their seven games on the road, including two with Carolina, and a swing through Tampa, Ottawa, and Boston. But apart from scraping out back-to-back loser points while being outshot 84-43 more than a week ago, there's nothing to commend the work Tocchet has done.

Given the hype around offensively minded guys like Trevor Zegras (zero goal, two assists, minus-7, playing 18:02 per game), Matvei Michkov (two goals, minus-7, 15:07), and Porter Martone (one goal, minus-2, 13:35), you'd think that Tocchet would at least unleash those guys to go do what they do best. But nope, not a lot going on there, except nearly half the team's goals in limited minutes.

The other highly paid veterans, like Travis Konecny and Sean Couturier, aren't moving the needle, either.

One's mind drifts back to a time when forward Elias Pettersson with the Vancouver Canucks wasn't, as they say, playing the game the right way. Tocchet decided his franchise center therefore needed to have his approach to the game completely changed, to the point where he became a negative-value player due to his contract.

Tocchet was committed to rebuilding a player whose mentality was admittedly way off, albeit for preventable reasons. He approached it in the exact wrong way.

On a related note, through the first seven games of this new season, with a new coach, Pettersson has as many points as the entire Flyers team has goals. It's just something to think about.

All indications out of Philadelphia are that Tocchet's job is safe, for now. As losses mount, though, it becomes harder to ignore that this isn't just going away on its own. Again, it's not just bad bounces, it's a historically bad early-season process. Outside of pre-salary cap expansion years, teams just don't open the season looking this pathetic.

Has Tocchet offered a single answer for it? No, but the team will likely explore other options first.

It's fine for the Flyers to go into the season accepting that they're not going to be good, but you want to see silver linings in every loss. Martone producing offense would be nice, but he can barely get ice time.

Maybe it would be cool if Michkov were rewarded for working 1-on-1 with a Flyers coach all summer and losing 30 pounds. But what if, instead, he were 14th on the team in time on ice?

Ultimately, it boils down to this quote from Tocchet after Sunday's loss to Carolina: "I think we go off the rails at certain points of the game. I don't know if it's experience, pressure, I don't know."

It is, simply put, his job to know. The fact that he doesn't, and the team is already dead last in the Eastern Conference, does not inspire hope for the remaining 77 games.

Whether that should cost him his job, even on a team with low expectations and some notably absent vets, is a reasonable question. Whether it will, just two years into a five-year contract that pays him $5.25 million a year, is a different issue.

For action-packed issues, access to the entire magazine archive and a free issue, subscribe to The Hockey News at THN.com/free.

See more of The Hockey News on Google and save us as a preferred source. Get the latest news and trending stories by subscribing to our newsletter here. And share your thoughts by commenting below the article on THN.com or creating your own post in our community forum.