Firing Rick Tocchet today misses the point. He didn't build this roster, and he isn't the reason the Flyers have been outscored 28-8 through seven games or why Philadelphia went winless to open a season for the first time in franchise history. He's just the easiest name to chant, and that's why the building picked it.
Sunday's 4-1 loss to Carolina made it official. At 0-5-2, this is a record no Flyers team had ever owned. The last two Philadelphia teams that even flirted with it, back in 1999-00 and 2008-09, both won their seventh game and both went on to make the playoffs. This group didn't win its seventh. The boos came down for most of the night, and by the third period, after the defending champs put the game away, pockets of the crowd were chanting for the coach to go.
That chant ignores the one thing coaches usually lose last: the room. Trevor Zegras said Sunday the players are fully behind Tocchet. It wasn't just Zegras running cover for the bench, either. Sean Couturier said it plainly: "We can't skill our way out of this one. We have a lot of talent, but we can't skill ourselves out of it." That's a captain pointing at his own stall.
There's a theory going around that this runs deeper than tactics, that a team this fun last spring doesn't crater this fast unless something inside it has broken. Maybe. But a shorthanded roster getting outscored 28-8 doesn't need a mystery to explain it. Travis Konecny, Cam York and Rasmus Ristolainen are all hurt, and even with all three back, this team doesn't magically flip a switch. The talent that was supposed to carry nights like these has gone quiet. Zegras, who signed a four-year, $36.5 million extension off a career-high 26 goals and 67 points, has two points and no goals so far. You can scheme around a slump. You can't scheme a star back into form from the bench.
Point the accountability where it belongs. Danny Briere assembled this team and told everyone over the weekend it wasn't time to panic over a bad stretch, before conceding it was getting close. He's the one who looked at a young roster coming off a playoff run and decided it was ready to take the next step without doing much to make sure it could. When a general manager's bet goes this wrong this fast, the first instinct is always to hand the bill to the coach. Philadelphia is reaching for that instinct already.
Tocchet isn't hiding from any of it. "I think we go off the rails at certain points of the game," he said. "I don't know if it's experience, pressure, I don't know." He sounds like a coach watching his roster fail him in real time.
None of this makes him untouchable. If the Flyers are still winless deep into November, he's gone, and nobody in that front office will pretend otherwise, because ownership will want a scalp and the coach is always the cheapest one to take. Right now, though, the firing talk is fan frustration outrunning the facts. The people who built this roster have a lot more explaining to do than the guy drawing up the forecheck.
