The Flyers are 0-6-3, the worst start in franchise history, and the coach owns part of that: with the game tied in the final five minutes Thursday in Detroit, Rick Tocchet had his best offensive player sitting on the bench.
Matvei Michkov is the team's leading scorer. In a 1-1 game, the kind Philadelphia hadn't managed to win all season, he logged one of the lowest ice-time totals on the roster. Instead of leaning on him in the minutes that decide hockey games, Tocchet rolled his fourth line and his third defensive pairing. Andrew Copp broke the tie with 4:38 left. The Flyers lost 2-1, and the losing streak reached nine.
That's a choice. A coach who spreads his minutes evenly in desperation time, with a point already on the board and the season circling the drain, is telling you he values fairness to his depth over winning the game in front of him. Tocchet made that call, and he owns the result.
The game came against a Detroit team that had won just once in its first six. The Red Wings were beatable, and the Flyers beat themselves.
Nine games is nine games. The roster can't score, and no coach drags a group this cold into the win column on willpower alone. True enough: Philadelphia has been outscored 32-11 over these nine games and is averaging 1.22 goals a night, numbers too ugly to pin entirely on a bench decision. If the forwards could finish, Michkov's minutes would be a footnote.
But the roster being bad and the coaching being bad are both true at once. When the offense collapses, the one lever a coach still controls is who's on the ice when the game is live, and that's exactly the lever Tocchet keeps pulling the wrong way. A struggling team needs its best players on the ice more, not less. The constant line shuffling has just made a cold group look lost.
It's a franchise worst. The NHL has seen longer droughts: the skid is tied for the ninth-longest to open a season, the worst anyone's had since San Jose opened 0-7-2 the year before last, and nowhere near the Rangers' untouched 1943-44 mark. Small comfort in Philadelphia, where the Flyers host Montreal next and the drought could end, or get worse, by the weekend.
Tocchet was brought in to steady this team. Nine games in, the one area a head coach fully controls is the one where he's handing points away. He can't fix the scoring by himself, but sitting Michkov with the season on the line was a decision he made alone.
