VOORHEES, N.J. — The $64,000 question for the Flyers’ woebegone power play is: How do you fix it?
Five years of staggering through the wilderness, four of them ranked last in the NHL and one year – hold your applause – at next-to-last. It’s nothing short of a miracle that the Flyers managed to make the playoffs this season with such a paltry success rate of 15.7 percent.
Things did not get much better in the playoffs. Sixteen teams, and the Flyers currently rank 14th at 8.3 percent.
At Wednesday’s end-of-season media session with coach Rick Tocchet, the main topic of discussion was whether the coach believes he can fix the problem internally or if the Flyers need to find help elsewhere.
“So walking in (last summer), the staff together we knew this was a five-, six-year problem,” Tocchet said at the Flyers Training Center. “It’s a talking point every year here. So right away for us was, we didn’t want to make it such a focal point that it took away from other parts. But it is a focal point.”
There’s been an ongoing search to find defensemen with quick, accurate shooting ability from the point, but no one has grabbed that position by the horns.
Tocchet pointed out the Flyers incorporated a number of young players into the man-advantage situations, so they’ve made adjustments.
“They’re coming in fresh, which is great,” Tocchet said. “We get fresh ideas from those young guys. I just felt that some guys were never — as soon as we hit the ice – I could feel tension from some guys.
“We’ve got to release the tension. And that’s my job, to release that tension. Diving into it this summer, different way of scheming, different way of practicing. Maybe less information, sometimes giving too much information makes guys tighter.”
The Flyers did get off to a pretty good start. On Nov. 12, after 16 games, they were ranked 14th in the NHL at 20.4 percent. But things went quickly downhill from there.
As for next season, the Flyers will make it a point to either improve through strategy or new personnel, either via trades or free agency.
“We’re going to dive deep into it,” Tocchet vowed. “I’ll be honest with you, I felt some guys went out there and you could just see it, they were clenching their stick.”
Tocchet wants his players to perform the way Carolina’s did. The Hurricanes were methodical. They didn’t try to make perfect plays. They tried to create havoc and fool the defense with misdirection. Carolina was fourth in the NHL on the power play this season, though just 12th out of the playoff teams at 13.5 percent in their eight wins.
“Carolina is the litmus test for me,” Tocchet said. “They just go ‘balls to the wall.’ They just go hard. There’s tension (with the Flyers). Talking about power plays, I didn’t like our retrievals. A lot of time we had three against their two and somehow we never came out with those pucks. There’s got to be improvement. And that’s something we’re really going to focus on.”