"I read reports about the Flyers organization being happy the Kings won, and even rooting for them after their second round loss to the Devils. I can’t see how the Flyers are happy. How could a team who decided Mike Richards, Jeff Carter, and Simon Gagne couldn’t win in orange and black, feel great about guys who won the second they left Philadelphia?
....
I have written in past blogs, the Flyers have been great at finding great skilled and character players. These kinds of players exist in abundance, but the hard part is maximizing their potential. If one looks back in the last two decades, you would find many players who were put in a tough spot by the organization. They put unreasonable expectations on some of these young men (Lindros) or sign them to ridiculous contracts as far term goes (Richards or Carter) and think their work is done. It’s not."
I did leave out pieces of his post. In his opening, he's mostly venting his frustration on the term "Flyers West" in reference to the Stanley Cup Champions, Los Angeles Kings, and that they don't deserve to have any credit taken from that. If you would like to see his full entry, you can find it here.
After briefly skimming through the first few comments after his entry, all I could find were Devils fans trash talking the Flyers franchise, and Flyers fans piling excrement on Holik. Shocking!
I see his point that he'd have a difficult time imagining that the Flyers ORGANIZATION - not fanbase - is happy to see them win, and I agree in respect to Richards and Carter. Gagne's health concerns were just too high for too much money, and so they parted ways. As for the other two, I can't say I agreed with trading them for "off-ice behavior" affecting their play, either.
If Holmgren and Snider felt that the Flyers couldn't win with Richards and Carter as their best players, then that's a different story. The Kings' best forwards were Dustin Brown and Anze Kopitar in the postseason. Richards and Carter were cast in a second line role, and were able to thrive in it.
It's especially unfortunate that the Flyers traded Richards. I still believe the Carter trade was a great transaction, if only because Giroux easily took his center position and point-producing workload. However, retaining Richards (if talking to media was such a big deal, just give someone else the "C") could have given the Flyers Giroux-Richards-Couturier-Talbot up the middle in some order, along with Voracek at wing.
Missing out on Schenn and Simmonds is rough, but Richards is just a winner. He's won at every level, and that experience is important in a locker room. Everybody loved Chris Drury for having the same qualities, and Richards is an even better player.
As for the player development aspect of Holik's comments, I think he's a little off. The bulk of Lindros's problems as a player were:
A) His concussions.
B) Skating with his head down, which led back to "A."
C) His tendency to play "hero hockey," a term I just came up with 3 seconds ago after reading about Kobe's tendency to play "hero ball." If Lindros was breathing oxygen, he wanted to be on the ice to help his team. It's a noble mindset, but towards the end of his tenure in Philadelphia, his gobbling of ice time and frequent double shifting tended to disrupt the flow of the team as he popped in and out of the lineup. (Again, see "A".)
Then there were the well-documented chronicles of then-GM, Bobby Clarke, and Lindros's father/agent. Because that was a combination of embarassing/depressing, I'm going to move right along and forget that happened.
The contract terms for Richards and Carter were "ridiculous" so they could both be signed to cap-friendly deals, enabling the Flyers to go after more talent. Personally, I'm not a fan of any of these extra-long contracts, and I think they'll go away in this next Collective Bargaining Agreement anyway, so it's a moot point. Either way, I don't see the tangible association between contract term and a player's results on the ice... unless that player only brings his best in contract years.
As long as Philadelphia's current superstar, Claude Giroux, doesn't intend to negotiate his next contract with his father or sign a contract through 2027, I have faith that he'll be managed just fine.
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