The Flyers have a Rick Tocchet problem

When Rick Tocchet was hired this past summer as the new head coach for the Philadelphia Flyers, the fanbase was immediately split on the hire.

Half of the fanbase remembered the player Tocchet was here in Philadelphia. 11 years in the Orange and Black altogether will leave a lasting impression on those who grew up with him and watched him on the ice. He was seen as the former great coming back to save the team from a decade-plus of darkness. He had just won the Jack Adams with the Canucks two years prior as well. The Flyers rolled the red carpet out for Tocchet. He was yet another step forward in their “New Era of Orange.”

The other half of the fanbase saw right through the hire. Tocchet really hasn’t been the most successful head coach in the NHL by any means. His time as an assistant with the Penguins was great, no one can take that away from him, but in reality, his teams in Arizona and Vancouver left much to be desired. Tocchet has made the playoffs only twice as a head coach. One was kind of a fluke season where his Canucks team had an otherworldly shooting percentage while the Canucks goalies had an incredibly high save percentage (the season he won the Jack Adams, by the way). The other was the 2019-2020 season where the 11-seeded Coyotes were invited to the bubble solely because the NHL had twelve teams per conference make the dance due to the shutdown. That team would not have made the playoffs if the shutdown didn’t happen.

This is not just to bring up his past failures though. He is the Flyers head coach, so let’s talk about the Flyers. The Flyers are barely past the halfway point in Tocchet’s first year of a five year deal… and the fanbase already wants blood.

It started off fine. Good, even! On opening night Tocchet was introduced to the fans and the Xfinity Mobile Arena ERUPTED. It was a “welcome back” cheer and a “save us” cheer all at once. It started off great on paper too. The Flyers were winning! Newly acquired goalie Dan Vladař was looking like a possible Vezina candidate! Trevor Zegras was humming at around a point per game pace, adding yet another young promising player to this young team that the fans could get excited about! Even Christian Dvorak, the big signing this past summer that a lot of fans did not approve of, was producing well!

Overall, it seemed like Tocchet had the ship going in the right direction. But when you looked at the Flyers under a microscope, there were some problems that started to arrive early that fans were brushing off because they were winning. The team was barely scoring, or even barely getting shots on goal. They never won in regulation and barely won in overtime either. They were winning a lot because of the shootout (never thought anyone would say that about the Flyers, huh?) On top of that, Matvei Michkov was starting to be restricted in what he was doing on the ice, and even benched for extended periods of time. The Flyers’ fourth line was a black hole. It was one of, if not the worst, lines in the NHL in terms of point production. The minutes were being misused on players who had not been producing, resulting in boring hockey that more often than not was just them playing for another loser point.

Tocchet also started going down the path of saying one thing to the media then doing the exact opposite. The two most notable times this happened were when talking about Nikita Grebenkin and Emil Andrae. Both times to the media Tocchet made the claim that they were playing well and that they needed to find some more minutes for them. Well lets see what happened to both players after Tocchet made these statements to the media. In Grebenkin’s case, the month following the quote from Tocchet, Grebenkin was scratched about one fourth of the games and was near the bottom of the team in average ice time. In Andrae’s case, just a couple days following Tocchet’s quote, Andrae was sent back down to the AHL. Not a great way to gain trust from your fanbase or the local media.

More and more fans started to voice their concerns as the season progressed, mostly about Michkov’s minute restrictions/misusage, which in turn, had the beat writers asking more questions about Michkov at the press conferences. It got to the point Tocchet snapped at the writers.

“We’re 17-10, we have a good record. I’ve answered six Michkov questions. I mean, enough is enough.”

Okay, before getting into the Michkov part, the fact checkers have determined that at the time of this quote they were, in fact, not 17-10. That was a disingenuous answer as Tocchet conveniently left out OT losses. For those wondering, the Flyers were actually 17-17 (17-10-7) at the time of the quote.

But the real problem from that quote worried Flyers fans more, as Tocchet had started to show off his fatal flaw which may have been the reason he got ran out of town in both Vancouver and Arizona: misusing skilled players by forcing them to fit his scheme and restricting their minutes if they did not play to that scheme perfectly. If you were wondering if that quote sounded a bit familiar… well here’s a quote from Tocchet during his time in Vancouver.

“You guys are obsessed with Petey, huh? It’s Petey, Petey, Petey every game. I know what you’re saying. I love you guys, but it gets old… I know you want me to say the wrong thing. That’s why. I’m not falling for that trap anymore.”

He said almost the same thing about Canucks superstar center Elias Pettersson, who had been putting up multiple All-Star level seasons before Tocchet arrived there. Once Tocchet arrived, Pettersson was being misused and scapegoated by Tocchet, resulting in the worst season of his career in 2024-2025.

It’s the same playbook every time Tocchet takes over a team. Try to force a square peg into a round hole, get mad that it’s not working and blame it on the square peg for not being round, then getting mad and deflecting blame when people keep asking him over and over, “hey, so why are you still trying to put that square peg in the round hole? Maybe try putting the square peg in the square hole.”

Whatever juice the Flyers had to start the season is gone. Once the team got past the Ducks game on January 6th, they checked out. That is a coaching problem. The minutes haven’t changed and the lines have not been tinkered with as much as they should be with the injuries they have and how unproductive they have been. That is a coaching problem. The ice time has not been reallocated to those producing well, it has stayed the status quo. That is a coaching problem. The team has been deflated and Tocchet has even come out and said as much himself. That is a coaching problem. The power play has been the worst in the NHL this year. That is a coaching problem. A penalty kill that was regarded as one of the best in the league over the last two years is one of the worst in the league this year. That is a coaching problem.

Many of the Flyers’ current problems revolve around coaching, whether it’s Tocchet himself or the assistants he brought in. While the Flyers are not going to fire Tocchet only one year into this five-year deal, the front office has to start to worry about the fanbase if this continues to go on.

While the Internet is not the end all be all of what fans think, looking at online discourse can be a good way to get at temperature check on what the fans are thinking. It’s like when exit polls come out after an election; not every single person participates them, but they do a good job of getting the general idea of what people are thinking out there.

Speaking of polls, for those who are on Twitter at all, you probably know of the Medieval Gritty account (formerly Evil Gritty before they were suspended). Now this is not a random shoutout to a gimmick Twitter account. One of Medieval Gritty’s bits is a monthly approval rating poll. Each month there is as poll for the three main members of the Flyers franchise: GM Danny Brière, Head Coach Rick Tocchet, and, of course the most important one of all, Flyers beat writer Charlie O’Connor. These polls have been going on since the Chuck Fletcher and John Tortorella years, so it paints a pretty good picture of fan approval over the course of at least 3 seasons now.

As of December 2025, this is where all three stood in Flyers fans eyes:

As you can see, things were going well with Tocchet to start, but he began to slip a bit in December. Also funny seeing how out the fanbase was on Chuck Fletcher by the end of his career here, polling at four percent. Well let’s check in on the current poll for January, specifically the head coach:

Well… that’s not great. In a poll of over a thousand people, Tocchet is polling close to Chuck Fletcher numbers, numbers John Tortorella didn’t even reach. Again, while the internet is not the end all be all of what fans think, this is something the Flyers front office is going to have to watch closer than they probably thought. If the numbers are this prominent against Tocchet this short into his tenure, one more bad season after this one could force the Flyers to fire yet another head coach in under three years. Rick Tocchet and his coaching style is still very old school, and it is similar to how all these past Flyers teams were expected to play over the previous 15 years. It gets to a point where the front office has to look in the mirror and decide on if they want to continue on with this Old Era of Orange that they have trapped the fans in the past 15 years, or genuinely move into the New Era of Orange they’ve been so adamant about.

The Flyers have a Rick Tocchet problem, and as of right now in the eyes of the front office, there is no immediate solution.

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