INSIDE THE FLYERS HOME VS. ROAD DISCREPANCY
Last season, the Philadelphia Flyers posted a 25-11-5 record (55 points) at the Wells Fargo Center. Unfortunately, the club produced just 33 points (14-22-5 record) on the road. This is not a new problem for the team.
As a matter of fact, over the last four seasons (2013-14 through 2016-17), the Flyers enjoy the NHL's seventh-best home record. Of the teams that are ahead of them -- Anaheim Ducks, Pittsburgh Penguins, Washington Capitals, Chicago Blackhawks, Tampa Bay Lightning and St. Louis Bules -- all but the Capitals have gone on in at least one of the seasons within the time period to reach at least their respective conference final in the playoffs. The Capitals, meanwhile, have won the President's Trophy each of the least two seasons.
The teams immediately behind the Flyers in home record in this four-season time period are the Nashville Predators, LA Kings and a tie (209 cumulative points) between the Minnesota Wild and Montreal Canadiens. Among this group, three have reached their conference final at least once. The Wild advanced to the second round twice.
Clearly, the Flyers are the outlier among these 11 teams. The reason: As good as the Flyers have been at home during this time period, they've been pretty consistently bad on the road. The Flyers rank 24th in the NHL in road record over the last four seasons, with a cumulative 149 points.
While the New York Rangers, who have actually been a much better road than home team in this span, have the NHL's best road record from 2013-14 to 2016-17, the leader-board otherwise looks fairly similar to the home record rankings: the Blues, Capitals, Ducks, Sharks, Penguins, Canadiens and Wild are all represented within the top 10.
Flyers general manager Ron Hextall said in April that the team's home record was of relatively little consequence to him and nothing to hand their hats on.
"To be honest," Hextall said, "I'd rather us be a 50-point team on the road because it's harder to win on the road in this league."
There is an element of truth to what Hextall said. The road is mental grind for teams. There is less opportunity to stay in a routine and get preferred practice times and duration (when there is a chance to practice at all). The road team is less familiar with the boards and other rink-specific quirks, although more and more NHL arenas have become fairly cookie cutter in nature. For goalies, the backdrops and lightning are a bit different from building to building.
Incidentally, during Steve Mason's tenure as the Flyers goaltender -- one in which he was among the NHL's top goaltenders at home in every major statistical category but had pedestrian road numbers with a poor win-loss record -- a commonly voiced complaint was that he would too often let himself get thrown off by the aforementioned inconveniences. Ditto things such as his brief attempts to wear non-white equipment ("retro brown" and "Stadium Series black" pads quickly got discarded).
Whether that is a fair criticism or not, I don't know. Mason used to mention some of these things himself on non-game days, but would also vehemently deny that any affected or distracted him when game time rolled arould. I'm not a psychologist, much less a sports psychologist, so I'm not going to attempt to analyze the now-former Flyers goalie's psyche. I take his word for it.
On a team-wide basis, the last line change is still something of a factor in home ice advantage, although the icing rule that prohibits substitutions for the offending team reduces that advantage somewhat, as does the rule that requires whichever center is in the defensive zone to put his stick down first on faceoffs (as opposed to the older rule that required the visiting center to get set first before all faceoffs).
Besides, all teams are in the same boat. Every club plays the same 41/41 split in home and road games each season. No club has had a wider discrepancy between their home and road performance than the Flyers over the duration of the last four seasons.
Even in the two seasons where the Flyers earned a playoff spot (2013-14 and 2015-16), they did just by eking out barely-above .500 points percentages on the road: 43 road points in 2013-14 and 42 in 2015-16. In 2014-15, the team had a solid 53-point foundation (23-11-7 record) at home but mustered only a pathetic 31 points on the road (10-20-11 record).
Is it a leadership issue? My feelings are mixed.
I personally have never bought into the criticism that the Flyers lack leadership. Claude Giroux perhaps isn't the second coming of Bob Clarke or Dave Poulin from a sheer captaincy standpoint -- i.e., the ability to not just lead by example as the team's hardest worker and ablest liaison but also to cajole, inspire and have tough conversations to hold teammates accountable when necessary yet retaining their respect and dedication. However, he is far from an unfit captain.
I've heard from enough of Giroux's former Flyers teammates in private conversations that he held everyone's respect in the room. They considered Giroux not just a leader by example with his own work ethic and willingness to grit through pain without making excuses but as someone who believes in building off the positive because he doesn't think dwelling in negativity is productive. Most NHL captains nowadays have similar traits.
The other designated parts of the leadership group in this team period -- players such as Wayne Simmonds, Kimmo Timonen and then Mark Streit, Jakub Voracek, Pierre-Edouard Bellemare -- have also been well respected in the dressing room. Simmonds is fiery and emotional and Timonen and Streit both had a knack for calming things down (although Timonen could also be very blunt).
That's all well and good but when the severe home vs. road record discrepancy has persisted for four years, it is hard to argue that the leadership was beyond reproach and everyone was buying in consistently. As with the criticisms of Mason's home vs. road disparities, there are probably some grains of truth to the complaints that the team leadership as a whole needed some improvements regardless of their unquestioned individual commitment to the team.
If you look at the special teams rankings, the Flyers were cumulatively 8th at home on the power play (20.2 percent) and 17th on the penalty kill (81.8 percent) for a 102.0 special teams index. On the road, they were 4th on the road on the power play (20.4 percent) but just 24th on the penalty kill (79.8 percent) for a total 100.2 special teams index.
The difference between being essentially middle-of-the-pack PK team at home (the 11th-ranked LA Kings killed 82.6 of their home penalties and the 15th-ranked Rangers killed 82.0, by way of comparison to the Flyers) and being near the bottom on the road had a significant negative impact on the team's overall record. In a league where one-goal final differentials (or one-goal plus an empty netter) are very common in games, simply the jump from being near the bottom to being around the middle in penalty killing is worth a few extra wins each season.
However, the real crux of the problem isn't on special teams. Rather it is at even strength. The Flyers' even strength goal differentials at home over the cumulative time span have often been sufficient for their 20-plus percent power play to help push them to wins. On the road, the goal differentials dug the Flyers a hole that was worsened by being a poor road PK team. Thus, not even their 20.4 percent road power play was enough to make up the gap.
Moving forward, the Flyers are going to have to start faring better at even strength (especially in away games) and bumping up a few notches in PK rankings to start moving up in the standings. Even with the departure of Brayden Schenn and the coaching change from Joe Mullen to Kris Knoblauch, the power play should be fine once it navigates an adjustment period. New weapons such as Nolan Patrick and Oskar Lindblom should be contributors in the near future, while Travis Konecny figures to take on an increased role.
Bottom line: It is not good enough to be a top-seven home team when you are a bottom-seven road team. That keeps a team on the playoff bubble, year after year. Improved depth should help bring the road record closer to the home mark.
***********
QUICK HITS
1) An addendum to today's Musings: The Negadelphia segment cares little about perspective taking. They prefer to simply pin all blame on the captain, the goal, the coach and/or the general manager. Nuance is non-existent.
The reality of the Flyers in recent years is that they've neither been "horrible" nor good enough to compete with the contenders. They've maintained a bubble team because there's a pretty core group but not enough supporting pieces to push upward. That's been for a reason, though: Hextall's primary focus has been in building up the farm system with a heavy focus on stockpiling draft assets, outworking other teams on the scouting side and investing a lot of resources on the development side.
Go back to the beginning of the time frame (Oct 2013) of today's blog and compare the farm system now to where it was at the time its 2013 Draft selections were just entering the development chain. It's like night and day. The Flyers farm system has gone from near the bottom -- primarily due to excessive trading of draft picks leading to a shallow depth pool to one that is deep at every position.
The Flyers have at least been in the second-half playoff hunt each and every year of this time period, succeeding twice and failing twice but without repeatedly taking willful backward steps in the hopes of forward steps at some distant future date. Doing a farm system rebuild while keeping most of a pro team nucleus intact is a hard road -- especially when there have been salary cap constraints along the way -- but it's been done well so far.
The scouting and drafting has been sound throughout the time period. Now the development side of the plan needs to show it is has been doing its own part to help produce some more favorable big-picture outcomes at the NHL level.
2) Reminder: The Flyers Charity Classic may be over for 2017 but it's not too late to make a donation in the name(s) of your favorite Flyers Alumni. All proceeds go to help Snider Hockey build the future Edward M. Snider Flyers Alumni Rink for use by the Snider Hockey program. Donations will be accepted until July 31.
Participating Flyers Alumni: Bernie Parent, Bob Clarke, Daniel Briere, Paul Holmgren, Brad Marsh, Bill Clement, Ian Laperriere, Joe Watson, Bob Kelly, Riley Cote, Neil Little, Brian Propp.
For more infomation,
click here.
Philadelphia Flyers Blogger •NHL.com • 
Join the Discussion:
»