ASSESSING BERUBE TO DATE
When the Flyers dismissed Peter Laviolette as head coach three games into the 2013-14 regular season, the decision to promote longtime assistant coach Craig Berube to the top spot met with its fair share of cynicism and criticism from the outside. However, in talking to people who had worked side-by-side with the "Chief", the consensus was that he was well-prepared to take on his first NHL head coaching job.
Having already been around to see what worked and what didn't work in the previous coaching regime, Berube was more likely to be able to hit the ground running. He could tweak what the players were familiar with but not shred it entirely. Detractors, however, suggested that an outside hire with fresh ideas might have been a better way to go.
Shortly after Berube was hired, I spoke with a Flyers alumnus who had been a teammate of Berube's during their respective playing days. He took a middle ground viewpoint.
"I think Chief is a good hockey guy and he deserves a fair chance to coach this team and see if he's the guy for the long haul," he said. "On the other hand, if you look at the history, when have the Flyers had the most success? It's been when an outside guy -- (Fred) Shero, (Mike) Keenan, Laviolette a few years ago -- was brought in to bring in new ideas and a new system."
That is true. However, the flip side of that argument is that Terry Simpson and Wayne Cashman were outside hires and rank near the bottom of the Flyers' all-time coaches. After his retirement as a player, Pat Quinn was groomed as an AHL coach in Maine before he led a "transitional year" Flyers to a 35-game unbeaten streak and a trip to the Stanley Cup Finals. Terry Murray has been in and out of the organization as both a player and coach but was one of the better coaches in franchise history.
In other words, an outside hire might not be the answer, just as hiring a "Flyers guy" may or may not prove to be a good choice. Every case should be judged differently.
It is still too soon to judge whether Berube was the right choice to coach this team. What I will say based on his body of work thus far -- a 17-13-4 record after a 1-4-0 start through his first five games -- is that I think he's done a good job overall. I am hard-pressed to think of any available outside candidates whom I think would have fared dramatically better over the same span.
When he stepped into the head coaching role, Berube's three biggest interrelated objectives were to improve the team's skating conditioning, break the nearly teamwide habit of getting too stationary and to improve the commitment to team defense without abandoning forechecking pressure for as close to a 60-minute basis as possible.
Taken on the whole, however, I think you can see improvements in all of the areas that Berube targeted as his main objectives. As he's found line combinations that have clicked, he's done much less lineup juggling than he did in the early weeks of his tenure.
Moreover, there really haven't been many times the Flyers have lost because they seemed ill-prepared for the game. Rather, when the Flyers have stumbled has usually been because adversity arose mid-game and the team responded poorly to it.
Not unexpectedly, there have been hiccups along the way. There is most definitely still considerable room for improvement.
Offensively, the team has been rather spotty for the balance of the season, with the droughts lasting a little too long. Defensively, the club showed a steady rate of improvement in October and November, but backslid for much of the current month. Protecting third period leads has been a problem that has cost the team in the Eastern Conference standings. The team can also stand to cut down on the number of bad minor penalties it takes.
The "gold standard" game the Flyers have played this season was their 5-0 shutout win in Ottawa on Nov. 12. All of the elements that Berube has talked about -- strong skating and puck support, smooth breakouts and transitions, relentless but intelligent forechecking, getting traffic to the net, winning special teams battles, building momentum from one shift to the net, blocking shots and receiving strong goaltending to boot -- came together for virtually the entire 60 minutes of that game.
Of course, no team can churn out a virtually perfect game like that every night for three periods. But that is the type of performance that is the springboard to winning streaks. It is no coincidence that the aforementioned game in Ottawa was the start of a 6-0-1 stretch for the team; which also included a 2-1 win in Pittsburgh the next night and a streak of five-plus games where the team did not allow a single even-strength goal.
In the month of December, the Flyers have allowed too many crooked number goals against periods. Part of it has been a bit of a fall-off in the goaltending performance of Steve Mason and Ray Emery. The majority, however, lays at the feet of the team defense getting sloppy with more turnovers in dangerous areas and more blown assignments.
One of the best pieces of coaching that I think Berube has done so far was in publicly noting the failure of Flyers' forwards to do their part in the defensive zone in a recent loss to Columbus where multiple Blue Jackets goals were scored off point shots. Goalie Ray Emery and the defensemen took the heat for it from most fans, but Berube astutely and correctly pointed out that the forwards were every bit as culpable for their loose play up high in the zone.
In the Flyers' last game before the Christmas break, a 4-1 win over Minnesota, the team played an outstanding third period while protecting a 3-1 lead. The Wild never got a sniff at a comeback because the Flyers remained hungry for the puck and relentless in outnumbering Minnesota players in crunch time. If Philly could find a way for this to become the norm when playing from ahead, blown leads won't be an issue anymore.
Starting tomorrow, the Flyers will begin a six-game road trip that figures to be very grueling. They have three games in four nights -- Edmonton, Vancouver, Calgary -- and then have a night apiece off between matches against Colorado and Phoenix.
During that span, there won't be much opportunity to practice and to re-emphasize systems play. Additionally, energy management -- not chasing games, not taking excessive penalties, not having to shorten the bench on too many nights -- will be critical to avoiding a drop-off over the latter portion of the trip. The road trip concludes in Newark on Jan. 7.
Put another way, Craig Berube is about to get plenty of opportunities to show that he coach this team from being essentially a .500 club into one that is more playoff worthy. It won't be an easy task.
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