It's not often a team owner gives an exclusive interview and spends most, or all, of his time talking about his team's lack of secondary scoring - but then again, Ed Snider is not most team owners.
The Philadelphia Flyers chairman, perhaps his own team's biggest fan, has always watched the machinations of his squad with a keen interest. That interest has grown keener and his desire to win a Stanley Cup even greater in recent years thanks to his advanced age and an extremely unfortunate unspecified cancer diagnosis this past off-season.
So, it's no surprise that Snider, in a recent conversation with Sam Carchidi of the Philadelphia Inquirer, revealed that he is particularly irked by the early season scoring malaise and generally ineffective play by nearly everyone on the current Flyers team not named Claude Giroux or Jakub Voracek.
"Never seen anything like it in all the years I've been in hockey," Snider said, per Carchidi. "Even when we were an expansion team somebody chipped in here and there."
In their last nine contests the Flyers have just two goals from the 15 players not playing on the top line - which may explain why the team is 1-7-1 in that stretch.
Snider, for his part, seemed mostly perplexed by the lack of scoring because the Flyers team is, save for a few key changes, almost the exact same group that finished last season 42-30-10 and went seven games with the New York Rangers in the playoffs.
"The issue is that we have pretty much the same team as last year, and we're not performing. We're hoping they can turn it around. We have two of the best forwards in the league, but two players can't turn around a team. What's going on with everybody else? What's going on with [Sean] Couturier, [Matt] Read, Simmonds, and the other guys? They should be chipping in with some goals. It's weird. I'm not going to give up on those guys. Even [Vinny] Lecavalier got 20 goals last year. What happened?"
It's hard to tell what, exactly, has happened. Lecavalier is older and may simply no longer be the player he once was. Read and Simmonds are both plus players, but neither are or probably ever will be a prodigious scorer. And Couturier, who has had his name pop up in trade rumors recently, is a young guy with a strong defensive game who just hasn't been able to find the scoring touch the team keeps hoping he'll develop.
Snider, as the players have done recently, did his best to aim the spotlight of blame away from coach Craig Berube and general manager Ron Hextall, who has only been on the job a little over six months. That leaves a roster full of underachieving players to blame for a poor early season effort that could lead to a few changes and a few new faces should things hold to current form.
"It's not going to be an easy fix if we can't get more production out of our players. You can't be a one-line team and win in this league," said Snider.
