Will Flyers give coach Dave Hakstol time to learn?

In two full seasons as Flyers head coach, Dave Hakstol has produced the kind of resume that spelled doom for some who came before him.

After a first season in which his team rallied from a sluggish start to capture a playoff spot and push the President's Trophy-winning Washington Capitals to six games, Hakstol's Flyers stumbled through the second half of the 2016-17 season and ultimately failed to make the playoffs.

Craig Berube, his predecessor, was fired after two seasons when his team took a similar arc. Bill Barber, a franchise icon, had a Calder Cup and four full seasons of mostly successful AHL coaching on his resume when he was fired in May of 2002 despite winning the Jack Adams Trophy as coach of the year the season before and despite coming off a 97-point season.

John Stevens, the Los Angeles Kings' new head coach, was gone a little more than one season after coaching the team to within one win of the Stanley Cup Finals and winning the Sporting News Coach of the Year award.

Hakstol's second NHL season was undone by offensive stars who failed to produce and the team's penchant for surrendering leads late. He also received criticism, both here and nationally, for his decisions to bench two valued pieces of the future, Shayne Gostisbehere and Travis Konecny.

Yet suggest that Hakstol is on the hot seat entering his third season as Flyers coach, and you receive the bemused smile that has become as much a trademark of Ron Hextall's three seasons as Flyers general manager as a slash across the back of an opponent's legs was during his playing days.

"We all have to meet expectation levels,'' Hextall said when asked about Hakstol's job security. "We've had a good camp. Our expectation level is the playoffs. That's the first goal, and we'll go from there.''

The Flyers are expected to be hard-pressed to do that. For starters, they begin this season with at least five defensemen with two or fewer full seasons of  NHL playing experience — Ivan Provorov, Samuel Morin, Robert Hagg, Brandon Manning and Shayne Gostisbehere. Last season's team, with as many as five seasoned defensemen playing at times, tied for 19th among the NHL's 30 teams in goals allowed.

They are also likely to play with, at times, at least three forwards with limited or no NHL pedigree: Konecny, Oskar Lindblom, and Nolan Patrick, the second pick overall last June, of whom much is expected. Patrick this summer underwent surgery to repair both an existing core muscle tear and a previous one, surgery similar to – but not identical to – the surgeries performed on Claude Giroux and Gostisbehere the summer before.

Those two stars, the genesis of the late surge in 2015-16, struggled for much of last season. And there are goaltending questions. The Flyers chose to not re-sign Steve Mason and replaced him with Brian Elliott, who was not re-signed in Calgary after an up-and-down season.

All of this adds up to more uncertainty entering the 2017-18 season than fans of this franchise are accustomed to. And that's almost certain to increase scrutiny on a third-year coach who readily admits to some growing pains when it comes to dealing with the emotions of young professional players.

"I still look at it as, 'Geez, I'm not very good in that area,' '' Hakstol said earlier in the preseason.

That was after he was read a quote from Stevens, the current Kings coach and former Flyers coach, about what was different about him now from when he was with the Flyers: "I just think across the board I've learned that the relationship with your players is the avenue to getting the most out of them,'' said Stevens. "There's really a foundation of trust there if you have a good relationship with your players. I think if they know deep down that you really care about them and they know that the message is honest … it might not be the message they want to hear. But if the player knows you care and he knows the message is honest, you can sit a player out and still have that respect because of those things.''

Said Hakstol, "I've got to be a whole lot better at that. Especially when you hear some of the honest feedback from different players."

That would seem to be a reference to sitting out Gostisbehere and Konecny last season. Benchings, by the way, that had the full support of the GM then and now. Hextall conceded that " `Hak' can be better. We all can be better.'' But it's clear he supported those benchings then and now.

"We have a long-term plan here,'' Hextall said. "And there are things that we do along the way that people may not agree with because a player is young. Well, if a player is young, he still has to do things right. On the ice, off the ice … young players are impressionable and if you just let them do whatever they want …

"I'm not saying that's the case with Ghost or Travis. But there are lessons to be learned along the way. And if you don't teach them when they're young, you're doing them a disservice. So there's all kinds of reasons … but people start reading too much into things, and then it's, `So-and-so hates so-and-so.' It's the most ridiculous thing.

"We have full confidence in our coaching staff.''

Translation: I wooed Hakstol from the college coaching ranks. I've seen what he can do first-hand when he was coaching my own kid. I am willing to ride out any learning curve he might have at the pro level as I ride out the learning curve of the slew of young players being inserted.

Hextall's faith seems warranted if, for no other reason, Hakstol, a parent, totally gets what Stevens was talking about. At the University of North Dakota, there was a stream of talent and a kinder schedule that allowed for more communication with individual players. The NHL level squeezes that opportunity sometimes, Hakstol said, to as little as 15 seconds in a day.

"I think the longer I go, I find the simplicity of any meeting or message is usually the best," Hakstol said. "You can go into a team meeting and think, `Man I've nailed this. So well-prepared. Delivered the message.' And then you go and talk to a few players afterward and say, `What did I say in there?' and you get seven different answers.

"So it's the simplicity of the message. Not trying to do too much. I think that's where you get in trouble a little bit. If you try to cover too many things in too short of a time span, it just doesn't work. For that reason, I'm learning there every day. And I'll keep learning every day that I keep doing this, for sure.''