A long time and several hundred Flyers head coaches ago, Ed Snider got angry at a press conference. It was October 2013. He and the rest of the organization’s brain trust – general manager Paul Holmgren, president Peter Luukko – had fired Peter Laviolette and were replacing him with Craig Berube. Berube has since proved to be an excellent NHL head coach, a Stanley Cup-winning one, but at the time, he was lipstick on a sow. The Flyers were in exactly the same position then that they are now: too far away from a championship for a new coach to make a lick of difference in their long-term fortunes. Maybe the franchise needed … shudder … a fresh perspective.
“We don’t need a fresh perspective,” Snider said. “We’ve been in the Stanley Cup Finals a lot of times, and we’ve been in the playoffs a lot of times, and the culture is to win.”
Over the eight-plus years since Snider delivered that line, so much has changed about the Flyers. And so little. A postseason berth is no longer a rite of spring for them. That has changed, for sure. But what hasn’t changed is the thinking that set them barreling into this decade of mediocrity and apathy, a period capped by this season: a 10-game losing streak, a 13-game losing streak that ended only Saturday, and the low point of the franchise’s 55-year existence.
