Rick Tocchet Attempting to Break Flyers’ Second-Year Coaching Woes – The Hockey Writers – Philadelphia Flyers

The NHL is full of coaching one-hit wonders. Spencer Carbery won the award with the Washington Capitals in 2024-25 only to see his team miss the playoffs the following season. Jim Montgomery coached the Boston Bruins for just over one season after breaking the single-season points record in 2022-23. The Calgary Flames have had two winners in the last decade and fired both the following season.

It’s been a while since the Philadelphia Flyers had a winner. You have to go all the way back to Bill Barber in 2000-01. But he’s part of a larger problem for the Flyers that has plagued them the last quarter-century: their coaches’ inability to build on success.

Barber’s predecessor, Ken Hitchcock, is really the only positive outlier. His second season featured a similar regular-season mark and a deeper playoff run than year one. John Tortorella also doesn’t cleanly fit the narrative since the Flyers improved from 75 to 87 points over his first two seasons. But that came as the team was transitioning into a rebuild, so it doesn’t feel right to compare him with coaches who were mostly leading win-now rosters.

Rarely did “now” feature enough wins, though. That wasn’t the case in Rick Tocchet‘s first season, as the Flyers overachieved with 98 points and a second-round appearance. But Tocchet knows the short shelf-life struggle as well as anyone: he left the Vancouver Canucks just one season after winning the Jack Adams himself. Now, he’s tasked with achieving something the Flyers have lacked for a long time: sustained success behind the bench.

The History

Flyers fans are plenty familiar with the decade of alternating between playoff appearances and whiffs from 2012-21, and that, unsurprisingly, is a big part of this narrative. It has roots before then, though. Barber is a crowning example of this. After replacing Craig Ramsey 28 games into 2000-01 and helping the team to its best regular season in 15 years, he lost the room in year two and lost his job after a second straight first-round exit.

John Stevens was more neutral than regressing from his first to second season. While the Flyers fell from a third-round to a first-round departure from 2008 to 2009, both were against Pittsburgh Penguins teams that won the Eastern Conference.

Peter Laviolette is an in-between situation: the Flyers barely made the playoffs in 2009-10 after he replaced Stevens, even though their regular-season records were almost identical. Of course, he deserves a lot of credit for guiding the team on a deep playoff run, going one step further than Stevens and reaching the Stanley Cup Final. But while the Flyers cleared 100 points in 2010-11 for the first time in half a decade, similar locker room dissent that festered under Barber culminated in an ugly playoff exit.

The Flyers did keep Laviolette, though, and after a similar result in 2011-12 and a playoff miss in the following lockout-shortened season, fired him after a 0-3-0 start in 2013-14. Craig Berube righted the ship and steered the Flyers to a seven-game first-round elimination by the New York Rangers, who won the Prince of Wales Trophy a month later. But the Flyers made a change above Berube after general manager Ron Hextall decided to make a change after the Flyers regressed and pivoted toward the future.

However, Dave Hakstol guided the team to a surprising playoff berth in 2015-16, led by a 30-goal season from Wayne Simmonds and Shayne Gostisbehere’s Calder Trophy runner-up campaign. Simmonds maintained his pace in 2016-17, but Gostisbehere and Claude Giroux struggled to return to form following offseason surgeries. Goaltending regressed heavily, as Steve Mason and Michal Neuvirth went from .918 and .924 save percentages to .908 and .891, respectively.

Believe it or not, Hakstol’s three-plus-season tenure is actually the fourth-longest in Philadelphia history, trailing only Laviolette, Hitchcock, and Fred Shero. A playoff return in 2018 didn’t sustain itself, and Hakstol was dismissed just before the end of the calendar year. The team’s next established head coach was Alain Vigneault, whose tenure can easily be separated into before and after COVID-19. The Flyers looked like a Cup contender in 2019-20 and turned in a respectable playoff effort, but couldn’t string together wins in the ensuing shortened season and fell into a crater that autumn.

Goaltending was a huge part of the 2020-21 regression, as Carter Hart’s game collapsed with no viable option behind him. But the 2021-22 debacle was both a roster and coaching issue, as nearly everyone and everything was at their worst, resulting in the third-worst season in franchise history.

What’s Facing Tocchet

Other than Vigneault, most of the Flyers’ recent coaches haven’t taken over teams expected to be significantly competitive. That includes Tocchet, as the Flyers were one of the league’s unlikeliest playoff teams entering the season and even more so after a January tailspin.

Alleviating prolonged slumps like that is difficult for a young team, but it’s one of the biggest challenges facing the Flyers. For the other five months of the season, the Flyers were a playoff-caliber team, yet they almost missed the playoffs because of those four miserable weeks. While the addition of Joseph Woll should stabilize the goaltending issues that were evident when Dan Vladar was hurt that month, other issues plagued them as well.

Of course, the Flyers would like to do more than tread water. Philadelphia’s defense was somewhere between sound and excellent in 2025-26. But to take the next step as a team, the Flyers must improve offensively both at 5-on-5 and on the power play. That will require developing Porter Martone into an impact player, getting Matvei Michkov back on the track to stardom after a tumultuous sophomore season, and squeezing a bit more out of more established players like Trevor Zegras.

Those things haven’t always been Tocchet’s strengths. They haven’t always been his weaknesses; 19-year-old Steven Stamkos won a Rocket Richard Trophy under his watch in 2009-10, for example. But that was a long time ago, and if there’s a time for Tocchet to show his adaptability to get the most out of the Flyers’ young talent, it’s now.

Expectations may be modest in 2026-27, but to attract the star talent the team currently lacks, they must continue looking like a model organization. That hasn’t been the case for a while, but Tocchet’s seen what it looks like as a player. This season will go a long way to showing whether he’ll do the same as its coach.

Prove-It Time

A lot of the NHL’s premier coaches have made their reputations by year two. Jon Cooper took the Tampa Bay Lightning to the Stanley Cup Final in his second full season. After historic ineptitude following a late summer coaching change, Jared Bednar had the Colorado Avalanche back in the playoffs by year two. Lindy Ruff’s second season of his second stint with the Buffalo Sabres ended their 15-year playoff drought.

Year two doesn’t say everything about a head coach. Martin St. Louis showed minimal progress in his second season with the Montréal Canadiens before a playoff return in year three and a conference finals trip in year four. But it’s been a long time since the Flyers have been able to sell consistent hope on the ice. Tocchet and his staff will have a big say in whether or not it stays on the market.