After Comcast Spectacor hired Dan Hilferty as its chief executive officer last month, it didn’t take a genius to see what was ahead and what happened Monday morning: the announcement that Hilferty was succeeding the retiring Dave Scott as the Flyers’ chairman and governor. This wasn’t writing on the wall. This was phantasmagoric spray paint coating three sides of the Comcast Tower and all 200 feet by 85 feet of the Wells Fargo Center ice surface.
Hilferty’s mission here is simple, even if the work ahead of him will be far from it. As the former head of Independence Blue Cross, as the point person for Philadelphia’s successful World Cup bid, Hilferty has established and reaffirmed his reputation as a mover, a shaker, and a problem solver. That last role is his most important in this new position, because as much as the Flyers need to rebuild the team that they put on the ice, they need a civic fixer.
For all of his good intentions, for all the measures he took to mitigate the reality that he wasn’t a “hockey guy” — you can fault him for choosing the wrong advisers, but at least he understood he needed advisers — Scott had become the symbol for an organization that had lost its way and didn’t know how to recover. The atmosphere around the Flyers for years now has been a toxic mixture of indifference and anger: People had stopped caring about them, and those who did still care were furious with them, and that backlash went beyond the subpar product on the ice.
