Rick Tocchet stood in front of cameras after Thursday's 2-1 loss in Detroit and said, "Consistency. You just can't have 4-5 people; we need everybody to contribute." That same night, his leading goal-scorer, Matvei Michkov, played thirteen minutes and forty seconds, fifth-fewest on the team, and watched from the bench while the game was still tied and Philadelphia needed a goal. Wanting everybody to contribute doesn't square with sitting the guy most likely to deliver the thing you say you're missing.
Michkov scored Philadelphia's only goal in Detroit and still got the ice time of a depth forward. The Flyers set the lineup. They decide who's on the ice in the final five minutes. When Andrew Copp buried the go-ahead goal with under five minutes left, it was the predictable result of a game plan that trusts the roster least exactly when it should trust it most.
Tocchet has a point, in the narrow way a thermometer has a point. As of Thursday, October 15, the Flyers were 0-6-3, nine losses to open the year and the worst start in franchise history, a mark they'd already set four nights earlier when they dropped their seventh in a row. They were averaging 1.22 goals per game through that stretch, which is pitiful and still trending the wrong way. You don't score that little without a lot of players failing to score. A nine-game hole is never one man's fault. Not enough Flyers have been good enough.
But a head coach doesn't get to diagnose a lack of contribution and then build a bench that minimizes his biggest contributor. If the message to the room is "everybody has to produce," the message the ice time sends is the opposite: produce less, sit more. Players pay more attention to who plays than to what gets said at the podium. They can see who gets the late-game shift and who gets a sweater for thirteen minutes. The quote is for the cameras. The deployment is the real memo.
Tocchet could've taken the microphone and said the honest thing: the start is unacceptable, and that starts with how he's using his best people. He didn't. He described a symptom he's helping cause and talked about it like something being done to him. Pinning a historic collapse on "4-5 people" while shrinking the minutes of the one forward who keeps finding the net is a coach auditing everyone's work but his own.
The room owns the shots that didn't go in. Fine. Tocchet owns the lineup card and the decision to glue his leading scorer to the bench with the game on the line. He can keep asking for everybody to contribute. He might start by letting the best one play.
