Ron Hextall's methods to rebuild the Flyers are old-school and new-school all at once | Mike Sielski

Ask Ron Hextall about the Flyers' future, and he plucks a 31-year-old memory from his mind. He has been painted, rightly so, as a new-school general manager vis-à-vis the Flyers' history, the go-for-it-now philosophy that guided the franchise's actions for generations. He is taking his time. He is not trading prospects for established players. All of that is true. All of that misses the old-school thinking that underpins the strategy.

So, the memory. Hextall's rookie season with the Flyers, 1986-87, was unique. He won the Vezina Trophy as the NHL's best goaltender and the Conn Smythe Trophy as the postseason's most valuable player and was the primary reason the Flyers stretched the Stanley Cup Finals, against a powerhouse Edmonton Oilers team, to seven games. He was also 22 years old when the season began. Kerry Huffman was 18, and as the Flyers' first-round draft pick in 1986, he was expected to be their next great defenseman. He was in the lineup for eight of their first nine games that season, then was sent back to juniors. He played 52 games for them the following season, under the wilting atmosphere created by coach Mike Keenan. He was still just 19. He spent 10 years in the league but never became a great defenseman. Hextall remembers his friend's career, and he wonders how different things might have been if Huffman hadn't been so young at the start.

"Was it the right thing? I'd say no," he said Tuesday during an interview at the Skate Zone, three days before the Flyers began training camp. "If you ask Kerry, he'd say no. Now, that was 30-some years ago, so when you have that history, you sort of try to figure it out."

Through all that figuring, Hextall has settled on a couple of principles that have guided and will guide his attempts to recapture the consistent success that the Flyers enjoyed before the NHL instituted a salary cap ahead of the 2005-06 season. Before then, the Flyers could and did outspend other teams to acquire quality players; there was nothing to stop them. Now, a franchise has to develop its own quality young players, because such players, at least early in their careers, are less expensive and allow a team to maximize the talent on its roster under the confines of the cap.

To Hextall, though, that reality doesn't mean he necessarily supports rushing any of the Flyers' highly touted prospects into the NHL. He evaluates each case individually, he said, which allowed him to justify keeping Ivan Provorov and Travis Konecny, both of whom were 19 at the time, on the Flyers' roster out of camp last year. But generally speaking — and we'll get to an exception momentarily — he is inclined to play it safe with any prospect, to give him more time to improve at a lower level of hockey.

Why that inclination? There's a two-pronged answer. One, Hextall genuinely has a traditional streak to his personality, an ethos that the hard way is the right way. If he worked as an executive in another industry, you wouldn't expect him to hire the latest millennial YouTube sensation, and he'd have a tough time handling the jeans-and-sneakers culture of Silicon Valley.

"You don't see kids coming out of college and becoming a CEO," he said. "They go in at low level and work their way up. There's something about human nature. We all want everything fast, instant gratification. And you know what? The longer you hold that back from someone, the more they're going to appreciate it when they do get to this level.

"I can tell you: Guys I played with, guys who play now, guys who are in the minors, they say, 'Hey, I'm in the NHL now. I do not want to go back and ride a bus.' As much as playing in the American League is a damn good living, when you get to this level, there's something that says, 'I want to stay at this level, and I'm going to work extra hard to stay at this level.' There's something to earning it."

Two, there's minimal risk, in Hextall's mind, in bringing up a player once he's ready, but there's substantial risk in bringing up a player who isn't or demanding too much of a player at too young an age. This is why expecting Nolan Patrick, no matter how talented he is and might yet be, to center the Flyers' top line to begin this season is far-fetched at best. This is why Hextall and coach Dave Hakstol gave Konecny a "reasonable chunk of the pie and at times took it away" — i.e. benched him — "to make him better long-term." This is why Sam Morin and Travis Sanheim spent virtually all of last season in the AHL, and why Provorov was such an outlier.

"It's not just the physical part. It's not the skill part. It's the person part," Hextall said. "Ivan Provorov is very mature. I don't expect him to take a step back at all this year. I expect him to take a step forward. I didn't expect him to get full of himself in the summer. He's not full of himself. Myself, personally? No way. I couldn't have handled having that type of success at 19 years old."

Provorov could. How did Hextall know that he could trust the kid not to fall apart? It's the same reason that 31-year-old memory and its lessons are never far from his thoughts. Ahead of the 2015 draft, when the Flyers selected Provorov with the No. 7 pick, he was playing in juniors for the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Knights. The Knights' director of player development at the time? The man who fed Hextall and the Flyers all the intel they needed about Provorov? Kerry Huffman.