The Flyers are a mess with no direction

There are teams in the NHL that know they are Stanley Cup contenders and know exactly what to do to make themselves better.

There are also teams in the NHL that know they are not very good, need to tear things down to the foundation and aggressively rip things apart for future assets.

And then there are teams like the Philadelphia Flyers — a team that seems to have no idea what they are and what direction they need to go in.

The first two groups of teams are pretty easy to accept as a fan. You know what to expect in the short-term and can adjust your expectations accordingly. But when you are in that latter group of teams, the fun simply gets sucked out of sports. And how else is there to explain the Flyers’ current situation? They have spent the past 10 years tumbling through perpetual mediocrity, missing the playoffs six times, finishing higher than third place in the division just once, and winning only a single playoff round (against a 24th ranked team in the league in the expanded playoff bubble). They are coming off of a 2021-22 season where they were not only one of the worst teams in the league, but also finished with the second-worst points percentage (.372) in franchise history.

It was, by every objective measure, an awful team with holes and question marks all over the roster.

As that mess of a season was unfolding, management talked a big game about how they were going to fix this.

The words “aggressive retool” and “blank check” were thrown around. That set pretty high expectations, and made the Flyers a potential landing spot for unrestricted free agent Johnny Gaudreau, or some other major addition.

But as we learned over the past couple of days the Flyers never actually made a push for Gaudreau. We know