When the Philadelphia Flyers resume their schedule Saturday afternoon against the powerful Edmonton Oilers, there are a couple of interesting things about their remaining 25 games.
· Will Matvei Michkov become the first player in the Flyers’ history to win the Calder Trophy as the NHL’s rookie of the year?
· Will this be the swan song for veteran coach John Tortorella?
Let’s take the latter development first.
Tortorella’s team is near the bottom of the Eastern Conference. At 24-26-7, the Flyers are six points out of the last wild-card spot but would have to leapfrog over seven teams to get there.
That’s not likely to happen.
So the Flyers will probably miss the playoffs for the fifth-straight season – the first and only time that has happened since a franchise-record five-year drought from 1989-90 to 1993-94.
Tortorella has presided over the team during the last three years, including a late drop in the standings last season. He coached his 1,600th regular-season NHL game in January.
The Flyers are currently just as close to the conference’s last-place team – six points ahead of lowly Buffalo, which has three games in hand – than they are to making the playoffs.
Missing the playoffs isn’t his biggest downfall. Failing to develop young talent is.
Little Development
Tortorella didn’t get much out of Morgan Frost and Joel Farabee, causing the Flyers to deal the former first-round draft picks.
As a whole, the young players on the team haven’t developed much. That might cause GM Daniel Briere to look for another candidate to continue the rebuild.
Tortorella, 66, is finishing his third year of a four-year, $16-million contract. Former GM Chuck Fletcher hired him.
The Boston native recently said the Flyers have to be “dead-on” if they are going to be playing meaningful games down the stretch.
“We have to push as hard as we can to stay competitive,” Tortorella told reporters on Jan. 27. “We don’t have game-breakers. We have to play under a system, and we have to push.”
Injuries have plagued that push…