Dan Hilferty and the Flyers are ushering out the old guard and finally charting a new path forward

Before he became the chief executive officer of Comcast Spectacor and the chairman of the Flyers, Dan Hilferty, then a freshman, stole away from St. Joseph’s University in the spring of 1975, got himself from City Avenue to Broad Street, and savored the city’s second Stanley Cup parade in 12 months. Born in Delaware County and raised in Ocean City, he comes by his Flyers fandom honestly and with a genuine appreciation for the team’s history and for the three men he referred to as “the foundational titans of the franchise.”

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Those men are Bob Clarke, Bill Barber, and Paul Holmgren, and those men are at the heart of Hilferty’s mission to change both the reality and the perception of a franchise that has fallen into irrelevance in Philadelphia and near the bottom of the NHL’s Eastern Conference. As much as Hilferty admires that trio for what they’ve done for the Flyers — on the ice, behind the bench, in the general manager’s office — there’s no escaping the truth that, for the good of the organization’s future and image, it’s time to move on from them as meaningful members of the Flyers’ inner sanctum.

“There’s an inscription in Washington as you drive along Pennsylvania Avenue to the National Archives that says, ‘The past is prologue,’” Hilferty said Saturday morning in an interview on WIP-FM (94.1). “What I like to say is, unless you know your past, unless you cherish the foundational titans of your past, you can’t move forward into a new world. So in terms of Bob Clarke, Paul Holmgren, Bill Barber, they are foundational titans, and they will always be part of this family as long as I am here.

“But mind this: We’re going to put together a group of three people who will lead hockey. They will be the decision makers. They will have the final say on everything. [Comcast Spectacor president] Valerie Camillo and I and the rest of our team on the business side will be part of that, supporting them, making sure that we can make the numbers work or whatever it might be. Those three individuals, who gave their lives to this franchise, will be part of it, will be there, will be available …”

Here, Hilferty paused for a half-second.

“ … if asked. If asked. But the new leadership will lead, will be the final decision makers.”

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Hilferty is well aware of the fine line he has to tread here. There are segments of the Flyers’ fan base who would be content if Clarke, Barber, and Holmgren were barred from the Wells Fargo Center, but Hilferty knows that freezing them out is not a realistic solution. He came to Comcast Spectacor after heading two giant health-care companies, sure, but he also was a vice president for media relations at St. Joe’s and spent years working in politics. He understands that how an organization makes changes, how it presents those changes to those most interested in and affected by them, can be as important as the changes themselves. This is the aspect of management with which Ron Hextall struggled most during his tenure as GM. Hextall pretty much shut the door in the faces of the Flyers’ old guard, which didn’t buy him any time, any patience, or much collegiality once the team got off to a terrible start in the fall of 2018.

So yes, Hilferty still talks to Clarke, Barber, and Holmgren. He wants to pay them the respect that they’ve earned for the decades they’ve given to the Flyers. But there’s no getting around this: Once the NHL salary cap came along in 2005, those decades of service didn’t make a damn bit of difference to the franchise’s fortunes. In the 18 years since the league capped their spending capacity, the Flyers have finished first or second in their division just three times. And even if Clarke’s, Barber’s, and Holmgren’s roles have at times been overstated in recent years, as senior advisers to former chairman Dave Scott they still had plenty of access to influence where the Flyers were headed and why.

That responsibility for repairing the team will now shift fully, per Hilferty, to John Tortorella, to Danny Brière — an interim GM who looks more and more like he’ll be shedding that tag soon enough — and to a still-unhired president of hockey operations. For all its potential rewards, this alignment has its own set of risks, too. The Flyers like to tout Brière’s analytically oriented approach to roster building. Already, though, they have infused Tortorella, admittedly more of an “eye-test” guy, with a measure of power that most NHL head coaches don’t have — and there’s a good reason they don’t have it. Their tenures tend to be short, less than three years on average.

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Tortorella has bucked that trend frequently in his career, but not every time. He is also 64. So the question of how much and how long the Flyers will rely on his insight is a fair one to raise. But for now, there’s no doubt that he is available and that he will be asked to chart a new course for a franchise that has been lost for too long. The same can’t be said for those titans of the past, and Dan Hilferty was smart enough to make sure he didn’t say it.