Skip to content
Link copied to clipboard

For once, Flyers are ahead of the curve

Jim Montgomery played with Ron Hextall and coached against Dave Hakstol, and he regards them with the same measure of respect, with an appreciation for each's intelligence and open-mindedness.

Jim Montgomery played with Ron Hextall and coached against Dave Hakstol, and he regards them with the same measure of respect, with an appreciation for each's intelligence and open-mindedness.

He was a fourth-line center on the 1994-95 Flyers, on a club that reached the Eastern Conference finals with Hextall as its No. 1 goaltender, and over Montgomery's two seasons as a college hockey head coach, his teams at the University of Denver played Hakstol's at North Dakota to a draw: three victories for Denver, three for ND, one tie. He knows the Flyers well. He knows these two men well. And he was both surprised and impressed that Hextall hired Hakstol - not only because an NHL team dared to mine the NCAA for its next head coach, but because that team was the Flyers.

"You look at what the Flyers have done, and you've had to have some tie to the organization - it's almost been like a cult," Montgomery said Wednesday in a phone interview. "That might be too strong of a word, but if you didn't have some tie to Paul Holmgren, Bobby Clarke, or all the other people who have led the Flyers to a lot of success in the past, you weren't really being looked upon. . . .

"I thought it was great for the growth of the game. Hak has had nothing but success. Hexy knew what he wanted, and I don't think he had it set in his mind that it was one person. But Hak was the person who had all the traits that Hexy was looking for."

For a franchise that has long needed a cleansing breeze to blow through its offices, for a league whose collective player profile has been evolving for a decade now, Hextall's most important decision so far as a general manager comes at a perfect time. It signifies that he is indeed serious about changing how the Flyers do business, and it could be a coal mine canary that might clear the way for more NCAA coaches to jump to the NHL.

In 2013-14, the number of former college players in the NHL reached a record 305, according to College Hockey Inc., an organization that encourages elite youth players to pursue careers in college. Thirty-one percent of all NHL players have gone to college, a 20 percent increase since 2000, so it was merely a matter of time before a franchise took that trend into consideration when hiring a head coach. Hakstol is the first NCAA coach to go directly to the NHL since Wisconsin's Bob Johnson did it in 1982, but make no mistake: Even if he founders with the Flyers, he won't be the last.

"I do think Hak has the ability to be a trailblazer for everyone," Montgomery said. "There are a lot of talented coaches all over the world. If you win where you've been, it's only going to propel you in this day and age. The way of thinking has really changed in the game, and if you're intelligent and hardworking and a successful coach at any level, people are looking at those people a lot more now than they were five years ago."

As someone who spent five years as a college assistant coach and parts of six seasons as an NHL player, Montgomery did not sugarcoat the challenge that Hakstol will face in his transition from North Dakota to the Flyers. Even an upperclassman will tend to view his coach as a mentor, a father figure, but in the NHL, the power in the coach-player relationship shifts. The athletes aren't amateurs. They're millionaires. Their sense of entitlement - even in a sports culture as humble as hockey's - will be beyond anything that Hakstol dealt with at North Dakota.

Picture this scenario, Montgomery said: A coach sometimes must tell his star player, You stay out on the power play for one minute, not a second more. If you don't get off the ice after 60 seconds, you'll sit out the next time we have a man advantage.

"It's a little harder to explain that to Claude Giroux," Montgomery said, "than it is to an incoming freshman."

At his introductory news conference Monday, Hakstol didn't duck the fair and obvious question about whether he could adjust to this higher caliber of hockey.

"I don't have experience at this level, so I'm not going to pretend that I do," he said. "I do have a great deal of confidence in what we do, in what my philosophies are, and in the fact that they're going to be successful here."

No one can know how he'll fare, but this much is certain: For once, the Flyers are the ones ahead of the curve. For once, after all those years of predictable hires and predictable results, they finally have an air of mystery about them, and it's damn refreshing. Jim Montgomery might call it a cult change.

@MikeSielski