Firing Rick Tocchet this week solves nothing. The problem sits one floor up, with the man who handed him this roster.
The Flyers were winless as of Sunday's loss to Carolina, 0-5-2, the only team in the Eastern Conference without a win, and the building let Tocchet have it after Carolina's fourth goal. "Fire Tocchet" rained down on the bench while the seats emptied. Seven straight losses to open a season is a franchise record nobody wanted. But a chant only reflects how angry the building was in that moment, nothing more.
After a recent loss, Tocchet said: "We just didn't have enough guys pulling for me."
That last line is the one everybody grabbed. "Pulling for me" is a coach making himself the subject when the subject is supposed to be the team. It sounds like a man who can feel the floor going and said so into a microphone. It's a bad instinct and a worse look, and it's the second time this month he's gone to the podium and put the effort on the players. After an earlier skid he called the team "way too comfortable." After the opener, a 7-0 beating at home by rival Pittsburgh, he said it was the worst defensive-zone play he'd seen since he arrived.
He's not wrong about the play. The Flyers were outscored 24-7 and outshot 219-121 across a six-game stretch. Those numbers point to a roster that can't defend and can't generate offense, and the person who built it is Danny Briere. One thing is on Tocchet, though: he keeps benching Matvei Michkov, the one young player this fanbase is desperate to watch grow. Freezing out your most interesting forward while the group drowns is a strange choice. But a coach shortening his bench out of frustration is a symptom. The roster is the disease.
There's a case for patience here. A year ago this same man dragged the Flyers into the Eastern Conference playoffs and won a first-round series over Pittsburgh. The fans chanting now were defending him in the spring. Nothing about his coaching got stupid over one summer. The standard changed, and meeting it was never on him alone. The same players who took him to the postseason are the ones he says aren't pulling for him. One of them, Trevor Zegras, stood at his stall after the Carolina loss and said he was "Fully, fully behind Toc," that the room believes they can turn it around. That's a locker room still with its coach.
Fire him now and you learn nothing. You hand the next guy the same forwards, the same leaky blue line, and watch him lose too. Briere hired Tocchet because he wanted stability. Stability means you don't torch the coach eleven days into a season to buy yourself a few weeks of quiet.
Tocchet's quote earned him the heat it got. The man who should be sweating is the one who built a team this thin and then went looking for a coach to blame.
