The Flyers’ apparent plan to build a contender, and everything that’s wrong with

Do the Philadelphia Flyers actually have a plan?

It’s a reasonable question for fans to ask. After all, since 2020-21, the Flyers have quickly slid into irrelevancy, first merely disappointing in a season with high expectations, to ultimately sliding all the way to near the bottom of the NHL standings in 2021-22.

With the 2023 NHL Draft looming — a draft filled with as many as four potential stars, including generational talent Connor Bedard — the Flyers could have chosen to purposely weaken their roster entering 2022-23, with the aim of maximizing their chances of adding one of those players. In other words: tanking. It wasn’t an outlandish suggestion: both Chicago and Arizona openly structured their 2022 offseason around the plan, while other clubs (San Jose, Montreal) took softer approaches to the same strategy.

The Flyers, however, showed little interest in the tanking strategy.

Instead of looking to bottom out in anticipation of the 2023 draft, they made moves that ran in opposition to said strategy. They hired John Tortorella, a 64-year-old two-time Jack Adams Award winner, to be their head coach. They traded away three draft picks to acquire Tony DeAngelo. And aside from buying out Oskar Lindblom, they didn’t actively jettison a single contributing member of the 2021-22 club.

The result? Philadelphia is not bad enough to have strong odds of nabbing a top-three pick. But the Flyers are also not good enough to be in realistic playoff contention.

Thus, the frustration from fans regarding the lack of a plan — a real plan meant to return the Flyers to their place not just as a playoff team, but as a Stanley Cup favorite.

However, it’s not fair to say that the Flyers don’t have a plan. They do, at least in theory. And understanding that plan as they envision it is important, if for no other reason than to properly critique its likelihood of success.

So let’s dive into how the Flyers envision fixing their current situation step by step. If they’re not tanking, what are they doing? And does it have any chance of working?

Step 1: Tortorella’s culture fully takes hold

This goes back to the point that I made on Saturday morning heading into the game against the Canucks.

It’s not that the Flyers had to beat the Canucks. But they did need to avoid another lethargic, disinterested performance like their previous two showings that week against the Kraken.

Why? Because it would be setting them down a path of resistance to Tortorella’s emphasis on effort and structure.

And why would that be such a bad thing? Because full implementation of the “Tortorella culture” is clearly the first step in the organization’s plan. That’s why they chose to hire him.

The philosophy of the higher-ups in hockey operations is that before the Flyers can be retooled or rebuilt (or whatever word one wants to use), the existing players need to all be pulling on the same end of the…