PHILADELPHIA — As of Friday, May 27, it will have been 47 years since the Flyers last won the Stanley Cup. If you have a fondness for the sadomasochistic, you can continue parsing that number to illustrate just how long that drought has been: 17,168 days, 411,744 hours, and on and on, until you risk crashing the calculator app on your smartphone or, worse, having the device, like an overworked engine, begin emitting clouds of smoke.
Now, given that the Flyers finished in last place this season and have inspired indifference in what was once a devoted fan base, lamenting that they haven’t won a championship in nearly half a century is akin to running your car off the road, slamming head-on into an oak, and cursing the forest. In the here and now, the damage is bad and needs to be repaired, and later on, you can contemplate why the trees are there, how long it took them to grow so strong, and why you’re such a lousy driver.
But in analyzing and accounting for how the Flyers sank so low, one can’t disconnect their present condition from their history. This downturn — the worst season of a decade in which the team has been at best a dull mediocrity — isn’t a blip. It isn’t the exception. It’s the natural byproduct of years of questionable decisions, failures in talent acquisition and development, and reactive or retrograde thinking. They had time to figure out how to avoid the tree, and they couldn’t.
