Only time will tell as to whether Philadelphia Flyers rookie head coach Dave Hakstol is the right man for the job of leading the personnel with which he's been to work to greater heights than his predecessor, Craig Berube. A proper evaluation is likely to require a couple of years while the organization is in the process of developing prospects below the NHL level and, in the meantime, trying to trade, buy out or otherwise free up salary cap space to work around multiple albatross contracts on the current roster.
In the long term, the hope is that Hakstol develops as an NHL coach while the organization is in transition and for him to blossom at the NHL level in conjunction with the maturation young talent filtering upward through the farm system to the parent club. It is not fair to judge Hakstol on a small sampling of games — whether in terms of the team's 4-2-1 start against mostly high-grade opposition or its current 0-4-1 slide in which heretofore struggling clubs dominated the Flyers.
What is fair to say that Hakstol ran a solid first NHL training camp and seems to be a bright hockey mind but there are nuances to the NHL game that he is learning on the job. For instance, there have been three games to date where a timeout seemed to be in order but the coach elected not to use it (presumably in order to save it in case a need arose to challenge a goal or no-goal ruling). Likewise, although Hakstol was used to back-to-back games at the collegiate level, the NHL scheduling is different and somewhat trickier to navigate in terms of preparation and logistics.
In the early going of his first NHL season, Hakstol's Flyers have had many of the same issues as his predecessor's. While that is to be largely expected, given that most of the personnel is the same, it should nevertheless be noted that the primary reason Flyers general manager Ron Hextall stated for firing Berube was that he didn't get enough out of his players and there wasn't enough accountability.
Through the first 12 games of the 2015-16 season, one would be hard pressed to notice a difference in how the hold-over talent is responding to having someone new behind the bench. Here are six issues worth tracking as the season develops.
1. Home-road record: Last season's Flyers were a 53-point team on home ice but struggled mightily on the road. Thus far, the Flyers are 3-2-1 at home and 1-4-1 on the road.
2. Special teams: The penalty kill was a trouble spot last year and has continued to yield at least once per game of late. The power play, a primary strength last season (and in recent seasons before that) is in an early-season funk.
3. Over-reliance on its goaltenders: This holdover problem from the last two seasons has been a glaring issue during the club's current skid. Over the course of the last five games, the Flyers have been outshot by a combined 192 to 139 margin (40-33, 33-28, 36-28, 34-28, 49-22).yet their goaltenders have put them in position four of five possible times to come away with either one or two points had they won a third period by a single goal.
That's what happened in the first game of the winless streak but they Flyers have been outscored by a combined 10-3 in third periods. The Flyers have yielded empty net goals in three of the last four games, but did score at 6-on-5 to steal a point in the first game of the skid.
Thus far, the Flyers' best player has been backup goaltender Michal Neuvirth.
4. Trouble scoring goals, spotty team defense: The 2013-14 Flyers scored a meager 22 goals through their first 15 games (posting a 4-10-1 record in the process) and then scored like gangbusters the rest of the year to finish eighth in the NHL with an average 2.84 goals scored per game. Last season, the Flyers had trouble scoring goals for much of the year. The top line and especially the top power play unit carried the offense, with irregular secondary support.
In both the 2013-14 campaign and last season, the Flyers were prone to defensive lapses. Last season's team actually cut its 5-on-5 goals against by 20 (a nice one-year improvement) and finished slightly on the positive side of the ledger but the team also scored much less at even strength. The play of goaltender Steve Mason last year also had a lot to do with the cutback on even strength goals allowed.
Under Hakstol, the team made a tweak in its neutral zone coverage system to reduce opposing zone entries with possession while also trying to get more motion (specifically with defensemen) in the offensive zone to increase their own scoring chances. These changes have yet to bear consistent fruit but it's still too early in season to say the team will not benefit as the year progresses.
A bigger immediate issue, more reminiscent of the start of the 2013-14 season than last year is that pretty much no one — including the top line or the power play — is scoring with any regularity. To date, the Flyers rank 29th of the NHL's 30 teams with an average 1.92 goals scored per game. The Flyers are 25th defensively with an average 3.08 goals against per game. Meanwhile, the early puck-possession data is very ugly. Clearly, there is still major room for improvement on both sides of the puck.
5. Bad games against "lower-tier" opponents: In the second half of the 2014-15 season in particular, the Flyers fared markedly better against contending teams with superior records to their own than against teams that ranked below them in the NHL standings. While it is far too soon to it's going to be more of the same all year, it is nevertheless worth keeping an eye on in the weeks to come.
Thus far, the Flyers played arguably their strongest games against Tampa Bay, Chicago and the New York Rangers and their weakest against the Florida Panthers (first meeting), Buffalo Sabres (twice), New Jersey Devils (who have now won seven of their last eight games against Philadelphia) and Edmonton Oilers.
6. Personnel evaluation and usage: Which players were the unhappiest — or at least said to suffer the most — under Berube? The ranks included Vincent Lecavalier, Luke Schenn and Andrew MacDonald. The first two remained frequent healthy scratches thus far under Hakstol, while MacDonald was dispatched to the AHL in order to get $950,000 of salary cap relief in order to be able to fit both center Scott Laughton and defenseman Brandon Manning on the opening-night roster.
In the meantime, the Flyers wanted last season to see Sean Couturier reach the next level in his offensive development — despite gettting a heavy burden of defensive zone starts against opponents' top scoring lines. The organization wanted to see greater offensive consistency out of Brayden Schenn. They wanted Matt Read to get back to his previous 20-plus-goal caliber scoring pace and for R.J. Umberger to be something much closer to what he was prior to the 2012-13 campaign than to how he played in his final year in Columbus and especially the second year of his Flyers tenure.
None of these things have happened to date. Injuries have been part of it, especially with Couturier (who missed the last six games with a concussion) and Umberger (who was out several games in October). Schenn holds a co-share of the team goal-scoring lead with four. However, the jury is still very much out on how many of these players — if any — will have the sustained breakthrough or bounceback that Berube could not coax from them.
A former organizational player that Berube took heat for "misusing" last year was smallish AHL-NHL swingman forward Jason Akeson. The player went unclaimed after being waived by the Flyers last season and assigned to the AHL. After signing with the Sabres as an unrestricted free agent over the summer, Akeson did not make the NHL roster out of training camp. He got waived, went unclaimed again and is currently back in the AHL with the Rochester Americans.
In the meantime, Michael Del Zotto was in and out of Berube's doghouse in the first half of the 2013-14 season before excelling and making it virtually impossible to justify his removal from the lineup. While the player hasn't been awful in the early going of the new season (after signing an off-season contract extension) — at least not compared to some of the other defensemen on the team — he arguably played better a year ago up to the equivalent point of the season.
Going forward, Del Zotto is one of numerous players — including Claude Giroux, Jakub Voracek, Wayne Simmonds, Nick Schultz and Mason — who played well over the balance of last season and whom the Flyers will need to play closer to last season's standards than what they've exhibited thus far in the new season.
Ultimately, it is the players who make a coach look good or look bad. Hakstol cannot be expected to work miracles but even in the first year of his tenure, it is fair to expect the team as a whole to be a slightly stronger version of a playoff bubble team. The very early arrows are pointing laterally. not north. The good news is that there's still plenty of time to turn in the right direction.
Bill Meltzer is a columnist for Flyerdelphia. Follow him on Twitter @billmeltzer.
