Flyers chief Dan Hilferty and his wife, Joan, traveled to Italy during the Olympics to take in the Winter Games, especially the hockey games, since three Flyers and coach Rick Tocchet were involved. Star winger Travis Konecny did not make Team Canada, but he made the trip anyway. There, he ran into Hilferty.
After a little small talk, as they ended their conversation, Konecny grabbed Hilferty by the arm. He looked him dead in the eye and, quietly, told his boss’s boss:
“You better believe.” Pause. “You better believe.”
At the time, the Flyers hadn’t made the playoffs in five years and, according to one prediction site, had just a 3.8% chance of making the postseason.
Three months later, they had surged into the playoffs, then they had beaten their archrival, in overtime, at home. Yet neither of these was Hilferty’s favorite moment of the season.
Hilferty stood on the heights of Citizens Bank Park, a spring wind ruffling the ever-immaculate lapels of his bespoke, dark-blue suit, strong and confident and, then, suddenly, verklempt at the memory of a moment shared with some of his favorite people, including his boss.
He’d been asked for his most memorable moments of the season his Flyers had just completed. His response was unexpected: The moments just after the team lost its fourth straight game and was swept out of the Stanley Cup playoffs, an overtime defeat to the Carolina Hurricanes in front of the home crowd at Xfinity Mobile Arena.
This ignominious sweep, the first in 15 years — this was his finest moment?
“Yes,” he said.
Why?
“I go to the locker room after every game, win or lose. So, boom, [the Hurricanes] score, and I get up, go to the elevator, get off the elevator on the event level,“ Hilferty said. ”And I just see a sea of fans. A sea of fans on their feet. And then they start chanting, ‘Let’s go, Flyers!’ And you could see the players, like — their reaction is unreal.”
That’s where Hilferty’s voice breaks. He’s 69, and he’s been around, a Jersey Shore kid made good: CEO of two health benefits organizations, a midlevel cog in the Pennsylvania government, a candidate for governor in the 1994 Democratic primary, chief of the group that brought the World Cup to Philly, and, for the last three years, he’s held his dream job: governor of the Flyers.
The new Ed Snider. Connected to the club. Living and dying with every shift. Desperate for his hires to work out. Eager to see validated his oft-questioned decisions, from team president to GM to coach.
And so, just before 9 p.m. on May 9, Hilferty found validation with the only folks who mattered: Flyers fans. Folks like him.
The scene was as unreal as it was un-Philadelphian. After the teams exchanged handshakes, Flyers players remained on the ice to skate around and wave their appreciation to whoever remained. Usually, it’s a couple of thousand. That night, it was 10 times that much.
“I just felt — well, I never needed to feel vindicated,” Hilferty insisted. “But I was just so happy for the organization, so happy for the team, for Comcast Spectacor and Comcast.”
Spectacor is the sports wing of Comcast, and Hilferty is CEO of Spectacor. Brian Roberts is the CEO of it all, and, that night, he was at Hilferty’s elbow. They live and die with the Flyers.
“I mean, we talk every day,” Hilferty said. “He runs a huge company. He’s a huge fan.”
After six years of amorphous corporate management in the wake of Snider’s death in 2016, Hilferty’s hands-on approach during the past three seasons of a painful rebuild has borne fruit.
When he hired an inexperienced GM, Danny Brière, and his nonexperienced president, Keith Jones, it felt like the Flyers were in line for another generation of the nearsighted nepotism that has so badly hindered it so often in the 50 years since its run to three straight Stanley Cup Finals. That sense only increased with the hiring of coach Rick Tocchet, who, like Brière and Jones, is a revered Flyers alum.
Those decisions could hardly have looked worse as the Flyers entered the Olympic break in February. Tocchet and unmotivated second-year star Matvei Michkov had been feuding for months, and the team had won just three of its last 15 games.
But, during the 20-day break, Michkov got into shape, Tocchet changed coaching tack, some veterans got healthy and started playing better, goalie Dan Vladař caught fire, and the club added rookie winger Porter Martone, fresh off helping Michigan State reach the NCAA tournament. Not only did the Flyers make the playoffs, they upset the rival Penguins with a six-game, first-round win, in overtime, the sudden-death score coming from Cam York but set up by Michkov.
And yet this was not Hilferty’s favorite moment. The love after the loss was.
“I have to say, it was nice to have kind of a public showing of that positive feeling,” Hilferty said. “What I’ve learned, whether it was running a business or doing this now, is that nothing’s perfect, but when you put four people in the room and have a long-range vision of where you want to go — I feel validated in that we’re through a phase of this effort, and we feel like the pieces are starting to fall into place for a long-term sustainable period of excellence.”
That begins with Tocchet, a hard-nosed coach obsessed with teaching and largely uninterested in your feelings.
“I couldn’t be more thrilled about Rick Tocchet, the spirit he brings to it,” Hilferty said.
Even with Michkov?
“Matvei needed a message,” Hilferty said. “Look, we’re behind him, but it takes two to tango. Everybody’s got to lean in. And although that was uncomfortable for Rick, and maybe uncomfortable for Matvei, I think it paid off in the end.”
Is this a sea change for a young player?
“My hope, and real belief, is that Matvei will come back as a different player next year,” Hilferty said.
Brière recently traded backup goalie Sam Ersson, smallish defenseman Emil Andrae, and a third-round pick to the Maple Leafs for backup goalie Joseph Woll and biggish defenseman Simon Benoît. The draft comes this weekend.
Since the Flyers’ decline, the Eagles have reached two Super Bowls, the Phillies have reached a World Series, and the Sixers consistently have made the playoffs with Hall of Fame-caliber players and coaches.
Now, however, there is a buzz in Philadelphia about the Flyers that has been absent for nearly half a decade. Hilferty feels it.
“We feel relevant again,” Hilferty said. “We feel really excited to be part of the winning ways of the city, but we’re not finished. I mean, our vision is to get to the top. I’m not going to hide from that.”
