Keith Jones was a polarizing pick to oversee the Flyers’ rebuild. The former radio jester has shown he shouldn’t be underestimated.
Many rolled their eyes when the Flyers hired as team president a broadcaster who also made flatulence jokes on the radio. Three years later, Jones has the team in the playoffs and trending upward.
Keith Jones didn’t watch. He couldn’t watch.
Since becoming the Flyers’ president in 2023, he has never watched his team compete in a shootout. He can’t take it. Too nerve-wracking. Pretty ironic for a guy who had watched and commented on dozens of shootouts during his two decades analyzing NHL games on TV, who has always seemed so loose and relaxed and ready with a self-deprecating one-liner.
But on Monday night, he wasn’t on TV, and he wasn’t relaxed. He was in the upper reaches of Xfinity Mobile Arena, and the Flyers’ first playoff berth in six years was on the line, and he was pacing in a hallway just outside the booth where he used to call games.
He heard a roar from the arena crowd and stopped pacing. Tyson Foerster had just scored to give the Flyers the lead over the Carolina Hurricanes. Jones noticed where he was standing. On the wall in front of him was a photograph of Danny Brière and Brian Boucher, celebrating a shootout victory over the New York Rangers in the last regular-season game of the 2009-10 season — a victory that put the Flyers in the playoffs, where they advanced to the Stanley Cup Final. Now Brière was the Flyers’ general manager, and Boucher was in the TV booth, and Jones heard another loud cheer go up, this time when goaltender Dan Vladař made the save that clinched the Flyers’ 3-2 win. Only then could he assume the best. Only then could he relax.
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“There’s drama,” he said late Monday night over his cell phone as he drove home from the arena, “and we certainly lived it in real life.”
Of all the people who contributed to the Flyers’ taking this modest but significant step forward, from Brière to coach Rick Tocchet, from Vladař to the players in front of him, no one had taken a greater risk or had more to gain or lose than Jones. He had become a respected voice within the sport throughout his broadcasting career at NBC and Turner. He had been a faithful and funny sidekick on the WIP Morning Show. He had a pair of cushy gigs that would have kept him reasonably happy but never would have presented the same challenge that overseeing the personnel department of an NHL franchise would.
So he went after that job and got it, and he had to learn to live with the divide within the reaction to his hire. There were the hockey lifers who knew that, underneath the affable personality and the quick wit, Jones might be smart and savvy enough to succeed. And there were the casual fans and the cynical, scarred Flyers fanatics who couldn’t believe that the organization’s new president was a guy who had spent most of his mornings making fart jokes on a sports talk show.
“That’s who I was,” he said. “There’s nowhere to hide. I was on the radio for 21 years. But life is a beautiful thing. I put everything I have into every job I have, and I’m hoping the same type of approach will work well in the job I’m in now.”
The approach. An appropriate word, because it has been the Flyers’ approach under Brière and Jones that has been the biggest source of public debate around the franchise since they took command. The Flyers didn’t go all-in on tanking the way that the 76ers did under Sam Hinkie, and the fear from many of their fans was that the team would never quite be bad enough to maximize its odds of drafting a future superstar or two. With the arrival of Porter Martone, the improvement of Jamie Drysdale and Trevor Zegras, the return of Tyson Foerster, and the recent revival of Matvei Michkov, those fears have subsided, at least for now.
“There are teams that have [tanked], and it’s worked for some,” Jones said. “But it doesn’t mean that you’re better immediately. There are instances where it takes 10 years. Time will tell how this works, but we believe we have a formula to get it done.
“This is a little bit of reinforcement that we’re on the right path, but remember: We had a poor season last year and traded away pieces at the deadline and weakened our team again like we did the year previously. So it wasn’t like we were trying to win. We weren’t going out thinking we had a chance to win a Stanley Cup. We weren’t trading draft picks to add veteran players to get into the playoffs. We were actually removing those pieces and adding other prospects, and I think that’s where we’re really going to see a benefit in this process.”
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That’s why this dormant fan base is so pumped about this playoff berth. It’s not just that they haven’t seen a meaningful hockey game here in years. It’s that there’s hope, for the first time in a long time, that the Flyers might be building toward something, that they have a young core of players who can grow together, that even better days are ahead. Yes, it’s still too soon for Keith Jones, former talk-show jester, to tell anyone, I told you so, but the drama he’s living through right now should be satisfying enough.
