When the Philadelphia Flyers chose to relieve GM Chuck Fletcher of his duties and then usher Comcast Spectacor chairman and CEO Dave Scott into retirement, it appeared that the organization could be on the verge of a full-scale restructuring.
The promotion of special assistant to the GM Daniel Briere to full-time GM status and the hiring of Keith Jones — technically an outsider to the front office but also a former player and color commentator for the club — as president of hockey operations didn’t exactly qualify as especially grand. But Friday, the new Flyers brain trust showed they’re prepared to reorganize the organization to their liking.
Advertisement
The final tally: three promotions and three removals. Alyn McCauley — previously the director of player personnel — was bumped up to assistant GM, making him the third with such a title, alongside existing AGMs Brent Flahr and Barry Hanrahan. Riley Armstrong was moved into the role of director of player development and Nick Schultz was named assistant director of player development. The three casualties of the day all came from the player development department: Kjell Samuelsson and John Riley (development coaches) and Mike O’Connell, who was a senior adviser with a focus on — you guessed it — player development.
It shouldn’t come as a major surprise that this particular aspect of the Flyers’ organization was the first targeted for restructuring. While it’s impossible to isolate the specific reason for the failure to turn a prospect pool that was universally viewed as one of the best in the NHL in the mid-to-late 2010s into a viable long-term contender, one popular theory is that it was less a problem of scouting and drafting, and more an issue of development — a failure to mold players into the best versions of themselves in their formative years.
Samuelsson and Riley were very much part of that group — joining the development staff in 2013-14 and 2014-15, respectively. Now, they’re both gone.
The Samuelsson removal is the most notable. For starters, Flyers public relations was presenting him as the director of player development as recently as last July, when he spoke to the media during summer development camp. He had a strong voice in that department. Even more significant is that Samuelsson very much qualifies as a “Flyers lifer.” He played for the team for nine seasons (starting in 1986-87) and then had a non-player role in the organization as far back as 1999. We’re talking about a person who has been part of the Flyers in some capacity across five separate decades.
Advertisement
The quality of Samuelsson’s work behind closed doors is basically impossible to fairly judge. But his removal does counter the fear that two former Flyers in Briere and Jones wouldn’t be willing to make tough decisions regarding longstanding employees given social or professional ties to them. Their willingness to move on from Samuelsson strongly hints that fear was overblown, for better or worse.
Briere’s footprint on the organization is especially apparent with the promotion of Armstrong, who moves out of his previous role as assistant coach of the Lehigh Valley Phantoms. Armstrong came up with Briere, working directly under him in 2019-20 and 2020-21 as head coach and then assistant GM of the Comcast Spectacor-owned Maine Mariners of the ECHL, where Briere cut his teeth before joining the Flyers more formally. In other words, Armstrong is a trusted Briere person, and an example of the new GM getting one of his people in a position of real authority in the organization. Schultz (formerly a player development coach and briefly a Flyers assistant under interim head coach Mike Yeo) follows Armstrong up the ranks as well.
The McCauley promotion, on the other side, appears to be more about creating a clearer delineation of duties across the organization.
McCauley already had the role of director of player personnel, which he moved into after five years as a pro scout. Now, per the news release, he adds two new duties: overseeing the Flyers’ pro scouting department and the Phantoms’ hockey operations staff.
Assuming that Flahr does stick around past the 2023 draft — and I’ve heard nothing yet to lead me to believe that he’s on the way out, despite his close ties with the excised Fletcher — McCauley’s promotion to managing the Lehigh Valley hockey operations clarifies the nature of Flahr’s role: leading the amateur scouting and drafting side of the organization.
Advertisement
In Fletcher’s front office, Flahr was clearly his No. 2 — he ran the draft, helped manage the big-picture development of the team’s prospects and served as a main adviser in all other areas to Fletcher. It was never likely that he was going to take up that kind of role under Briere, and not because he and Briere have a poor relationship (by my understanding, it’s quite strong) but because it was always going to be impossible to replicate his tight relationship with Fletcher — which dates all the way to the late 1990s with the Panthers in Florida. Based on the description of roles, it appears that assuming Flahr stays, his duties will be more clearly defined as scouting and drafting, with Armstrong now heading up prospect development (what happens post-draft) and McCauley constructing the nuts and bolts of the Phantoms’ roster in addition to running pro scouting.
Again, it’s possible that a pivot could happen post-draft — even if the new brain trust decided that they wanted to move on from Flahr, it wouldn’t make sense to do so until after the 2023 draft, given that Flahr has headed up the pre-draft process and removing him at such a late date would bring unnecessary chaos into the draft room. But my read is that Briere and the rest of the organization are more than satisfied with Flahr’s drafting, and are happy with the talent that he’s brought into the organization. Their focus appears more to be on creating an environment capable of doing a much better job at fostering that talent than was the case with the Ron Hextall-drafted prospects.
It remains to be seen whether Friday’s restructuring is enough, or even if it’s just the first step of a larger housecleaning to be completed over the course of the summer. But at the very least, Briere and Jones aren’t sitting on their hands. They’re beginning to put their stamp on the Flyers.
(Photo: Erica Denhoff / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
ncG1vNJzZmismJqutbTLnquim16YvK57k25ub2hgZXxzfJFsZmluX2V%2FcLLLspyrq12luaLFxKtknZ2mmrmwvMyepa1lnZiwosHLnrBmmaKiwLW%2BzqeeZquTncKtwNlo