It’s about 9 p.m. Monday night. If you were to Twitter search “rigged” right now, it’s shockingly apolitical. This is actually the result of – wait, that can’t be right – hockey?
As you know, Chicago won last night’s draft lottery, which also resulted in Anaheim receiving the second pick.
I get it. I’m on multiple group chats watching a number of friends dancing with their own hockey conspiracy theories.
We all had hope coming into Monday. There was only a 6.5 percent chance at the top pick and a 13.2 percent shot to be in the top-two, but we were all dreaming. Maybe you were envisioning Connor Bedard, the diminutive sniper, cutting through the offensive zone in orange and black and giving us our first generational talent in more than a generation. Maybe you were thinking about how he’d fit into the lineup and supercharge this rebuild, providing a clear and logical pathway to true contention.
Winning this lottery was like finding the cheat in the original Mario where the pipe skips you halfway through the game.
So, while the odds weren’t good, there was still a chance. And it was enough to allow for dreaming.
But the problem isn’t that the league’s rigged. It’s that the Blackhawks realized what was at stake and acted on it well before the Flyers.
Chicago and Philadelphia both appeared to have no path to contention 14 months ago. The Blackhawks tore it down to the studs, even trading some young, quality depth, like Brandon Hagel, and fully committed to a rebuild. The Flyers sold off a few pending UFAs and took some half measures over the summer, signing Tony DeAngelo and extending Travis Sanheim until he’s eligible for social security. The “aggressive retool.”
Chicago was awful. The Flyers were bad. We can all see the lottery odds. And while Philadelphia still needs a star player to resuscitate a comatose franchise, the Blackhawks landed the pick to get Bedard after what seemed like a nap since their dynasty.
The real slap in the face came late in the season when Danny Briere and the organization was finally comfortable admitting to the need to rebuild.
Last night was a missed opportunity resulting from all of the decisions over the past year or so. Kyle Davidson realized his team’s reality and the reality of the league well before Chuck Fletcher. This was the opportunity to start a rebuild with a generational talent, or maybe even a franchise player, with Adam Fantilli, Matvei Michkov, and Leo Carlsson rounding out a loaded top of the draft. Then we committed to a rebuild after the odds at getting one of those guys were dwindling.
This was a mind-numbing string of roster decisions. The Flyers were the fourth-worst team in hockey a year ago. I swear I’m never going to write about Fletcher again after this, but we need to close this book. He built around the philosophy that it’d be easier to incrementally get from No. 29 to No. 1 without gathering the rewards at the top of the draft and letting them carry your franchise. And that is how we end up with the team signing DeAngelo to revitalize Ivan Provorov, and the reality we probably would be better off without either less than a year later.
Maybe the seventh pick turns into a star. It’s happened before. But maybe he’s Provorov. Maybe this rebuild takes us to the top of next year’s draft and we get a player comparably exciting as the prospects at the top of this year’s. But maybe he’s Alexis Lafreniere. It’s hard to wait another year, clinging to hope, when we knew this team was going nowhere and this draft could have revitalized the team.
It’s now about 10:00 now and Edmonton is playing in front of a raucous playoff crowd, led by two future Hall of Famers they found at the top of the draft. This is what so many of us wanted for the Flyers. Maybe this rebuild will lead us there, but it’s still disappointing the Flyers missed this opportunity.
