O’Connor: Why I was wrong that the Flyers were poised for success after 2020

Ah, the halcyon days of early 2020.

The Philadelphia Flyers were in the midst of a 19-6-1 run that had taken them from bubble playoff contention to lock and borderline contender status. Chuck Fletcher and Alain Vigneault had near-universal approval within the fan base. Ron Hextall’s stockpiling of young talent had gone so seemingly well that less than a year later, the Pittsburgh Penguins would hire him as their new GM to — at least in part — replicate what he had done in Philadelphia. And of course, terms like COVID-19 and pandemic and shutdown were barely even on the radar as Flyers fans reveled in their club’s regained relevancy.

I was confident that the Flyers were poised to establish themselves as a yearly Stanley Cup threat. Of course, I couldn’t have been more wrong.

In fairness, I wasn’t the only one who believed that the Flyers had finally turned the corner in 2019-20, even with the pandemic putting a halt to their clear momentum for four months. In May 2020, the average “organizational health” score in our Flyers fan survey came back at 4.15 (on a 1-5 scale) and 81.9 percent of responders ranked their confidence in Fletcher in the 4 or 5 range. What’s most shocking to see now is that 76.1 percent of participants in the survey believed that the Flyers would win the Stanley Cup within the next five years.

That almost certainly isn’t going to happen.

So how were we all so wrong about the future of the Flyers? Looking back, it really boils down to three factors that I failed to anticipate or recognize.

The Vigneault fit

In September 2020, Vigneault finished second in Jack Adams voting, narrowly losing the award to Boston’s Bruce Cassidy. There was every reason to believe that the Flyers had found their head coach, one capable of not just harnessing the team’s talent, but elevating it.

A little over a year later, he was gone, after presiding over two consecutive severely disappointing campaigns. Vigneault’s presence not only failed to improve the team — it was making things worse.

I never expected that player/coach relations would sour so quickly.

In retrospect, my best guess is that some of the fractures between individual players and Vigneault — specifically in the case of Jakub Voracek and Shayne Gostisbehere — went all the way back to 2019-20 and became even more prevalent in the summer bubble. But it wasn’t until the heavily compressed 2020-21 campaign that the knives really came out and helped to precipitate the team’s rapid fall out of playoff contention.

The hope on Fletcher’s part was that significant roster changes plus a full summer for everyone to cool off would be enough to salvage the situation entering 2021-22. But when things went bad again in November, it was over. Vigneault had “lost the room.” By the time he was fired in early December, the Flyers’ playoff chances were basically nil. Two consecutive seasons had been lost, in no small part due to the fact that…