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Quick Hits: Practice Day, Fletcher, Wilson and More |
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Quick Hits: December 4, 2018
1) The Flyers will hold a 10:30 a.m. practice on Tuesday at the Skate Zone in Voorhees. At Monday's practice, Wayne Simmonds took a maintenance day, while injury rehabbing goaltender Brian Elliott put in a partial practice, taking some reps at the start before making a planned early exit while practice was ongoing.
2) On Monday afternoon, the Flyers formally announced the hiring of Chuck Fletcher to take over the general manager and executive vice president roles previously held by Ron Hextall. Several hours later, Fletcher spoke with reporters via conference call. A formal press conference will be held on Wednesday (details of time and place TBA, but most likely at the Skate Zone).
A full transcript of the Fletcher conference call is below, courtesy of the Flyers, and a five key takeaways article from the conference call will run on Tuesday morning on Flyers.NHL.com. In bullet-point rundown, the main points raised in the conference call were as follows:
* There will not be an imminent change of head coach.
* In terms of roster moves, there will be an evaluation period first to assess whether there are in-house solutions to areas that need improvement such as the penalty kill.
* Fletcher's aim is for the team to make the playoffs this season but also to make sure the team remains well set up for the future (he praised the work that Hextall did in that area, along with creating salary cap space).
* There will not be an imminent hiring of an assistant general manager.
3) There are as-yet unconfirmed reports that the Flyers plan to hire veteran coach Rick Wilson. Wilson is one of the NHL's most experienced coaches, with specializations in working with defensemen and/or special teams. A Flyers vacancy was created last Wednesday with the dismissal of Gord Murphy as the assistant coach in charge of defensemen.
The 68-year-old has been an NHL coach, primarily as an assistant, for the last 30 years although he announced his retirement from active coaching at the end of last season. His longest stays coming with the Minnesota North Stars/Dallas Stars (including a stint as interim head coach and then associate coach) over a span of 16 years and then five years working for Fletcher's Minnesota Wild. After serving as as a St. Louis Blues assistant under Ken Hitchcock, Wilson accompanied Hitchcock back to Dallas last season, working with the Stars defense corps.
A defenseman himself during his playing days in the 1970s, Wilson spent four seasons in the NHL. As a member of the St. Louis Blues, he once dropped the gloves with the Flyers' Dave "the Hammer" Schultz. Before he retired as an active player, Wilson spent a year with the AHL version of the long-defunct Philadelphia Firebirds.
Wilson retired 40 years ago to begin his coaching career, working at the NCAA collegiate ranks at the University of North Dakota and Canadian junior level with the Prince Albert Raiders before returning to the NHL in 1988 as an assistant with the New York Islanders. Before accepting his long-running position with the Stars, Wilson spent one season as an Islanders' assistant and three with the LA Kings. In between Dallas and Minnesota, he worked as an assistant for one year (2009-10) for the Tampa Bay Lightning under head coach Rick Tocchet.
4) Some sad news to pass along: Jim McKenzie, a Flyers trainer during the 1970s and early 1980s passed away on Sunday after battling with cancer.
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Chuck Fletcher Conference Call Transcript
Opening statement:
I’m extremely honored and humbled that Paul Holmgren and Dave Scott chose me to be the next general manager of the Philadelphia Flyers. I’ve been in the game for many years and the Flyers have been one of the standard bearers of the National Hockey League, and one of the best franchises. To have the opportunity to be the general manager of the Flyers is a dream come true.
On the current roster and organizational depth:
I want to start right off by acknowledging the job that Ron Hextall did. The Flyers have as many prospects as any team in the league, if not more. There’s a very strong foundation in place. The team is in a good cap position, and there are a lot of good players on the team. Right now we’re I believe in 15th place in the Eastern Conference; we have some work to do, no doubt. But there are some very strong players here. There are some young players that are finding their way in the NHL and getting better. In a few more weeks I’ll probably have a much better answer for you. I’m looking forward to sitting down with the coaches very shortly and getting to meet the players. I plan on meeting with the players and staff tomorrow and talking generally about expectations. It’s a good group coming in from the outside, but certainly I’m going to take some time here to get to know them much better.
On his impressions of Dave Hakstol:
I’ve known Dave for a while. I met Dave a few times while he was at North Dakota. He did a tremendous job at North Dakota. His teams always got better as the season went on. When you had a player that was drafted by your organization that attended North Dakota, they always got better, they always developed. So I have a lot of respect for what he’s accomplished in his career. I’m just coming in. I’m a big believer in trying to get to know a situation before making a reaction. I’d like to think we can solve a lot of the issues that have plagued the team this year and find a way to get better. I certainly have no intention of making a coaching change tomorrow, if that’s your question. I’m going to meet with Dave and we’re going to try to work together and push. Our goal is to try to make the playoffs this year, it’s that simple. We have work to do, and it’ll be a challenge. But there’s no reason why we can’t get better, and we can’t push to make the playoffs and find a way to get in.
On timetable for hiring an assistant GM:
Certainly I will address that. I’m pretty familiar with a lot of the staff that’s already in place here. I’ve gotten to know them pretty well over the years and I think it’s a really strong staff, and a lot of good people here. Clearly we will look to replace that role and hire somebody, but there’s nothing imminent right now. If we can do it during the season, great; if it takes until the end of the season, that’s great too. That’s something I’m going to put a lot of time and thought into. First I want to come in and see the people that are here and the roles that they’re doing, and maybe where we need to fill. I think that would be the important thing to do prior to making a hire.
On working for Bob Clarke as assistant general manager during the 1993-94 season with the Florida Panthers:
It’s been a while. 25 years ago, Bob hired me and brought me to Florida in April of 1993. I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia when my dad ran the Atlanta Flames, and Philadelphia was the nemesis. That was the team that always beat the Flames, and Bob Clarke was usually the one doing the damage. I grew up with a tremendous amount of respect for Bob. He was a great guy to work for. The first NHL team I worked for, I think I learned more that year than any other year of my career. I consider him both a mentor and a friend. He gave me a lot of autonomy, a lot of authority early on, let me do some contracts when I was 24, 25 years old, and really got me started in this business.
On his approach here vs. his approach in Minnesota:
I think the first thing I would say, in all candidness – Philadelphia right now, we have a very strong group of young players, prospects… we have nine draft picks this year, an extra third, an extra seventh, we do have cap space. Those are all resources that you can use to make your team better. For me, I think right now looking at this club from outside, and again I’ll dig into it more in the coming weeks, there’s no reason why we can’t be a playoff team now, and going forward I think we’ll continue to get better. You want to compete in the present, and you’ve got to be respectful of making sure you have a strong team for the future. But there’s great resources in place here, and it’s a very fortunate position to be in.
On whether Paul or Dave described the type of GM they were looking for in regards to someone with a “bias for action”:
I don’t know that they said that in so many words. The one thing they did say to me is they were looking for somebody who had been a general manager before and maybe had dealt with some of the situations that come up and that had some experience, but they didn’t necessarily say that. We went through my history and I explained to them the way I’d like to operate, and it just seemed to fit. I was in on Thursday and Friday and we had some great conversations, and I can tell you from my standpoint I feel very comfortable working for Paul and Dave.
On his defining his general approach and whether he will ease in to his new job:
The term “ease in”… we’re 25 games in, there’s still a lot of runway left in the season, but the season also gets old pretty quickly. I would like to see what solutions we have to some of our problems and see if we have some of those solutions in-house, see if we have some solutions internally. We’re 29th in the league in goals against right now, and obviously there’s been a lot of injuries to the goaltending, there’s been a lot of uncertainty in that position. But clearly we need to give up fewer goals. There’s no doubt about that. So how do we go about that? The first thing for me is I’d like to sit down with the coaches and let’s see what we can do. How can we improve? If we can’t find the solutions internally, then I certainly will look externally and do what we can to improve the team. But our goal is to make the playoffs this year, and we’d like to find solutions to get there. I can tell you I’ll be aggressive in that sense, but the first thing I think you have to do is see if you have in-house solutions.
Is there a specific area Paul & Dave wanted you to address first?
Again, Paul and Dave were great. We didn’t get into the specifics of the team necessarily. We did discuss the team a bit, but they made it very clear they will trust my judgment and they will allow me to do the things I think we need to do to get better. I’m just looking at it from the outside, it’s not a secret – there’s five different goalies that have played in net this year, and that’s a lot. We’re 29th in goals-against; that’s too high. We have some young defensemen, and a lot of them are going to be very good players in this league, but it’s a tough league. We just need to look at how do we give up fewer goals. It takes everybody on the ice to prevent a goal. But getting some stability in goal would be great, getting healthy in goal would be great. Sometimes you can’t control that, and that’s why we’ll first look to see what we have here in-house, and if need be, I’m certainly going to make a lot of calls and see what’s out there, and if we have to make a move we’ll be ready to do so.
Philadelphia Flyers Blogger •NHL.com • 
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