(Kate Frese/Sports Talk Philly)
By Rob Riches, Sports Talk Philly staff 
This week, the Flyers will finally take the ice and get ready for the 2017-18 season. Offseasons always feel longer when you miss the playoffs, and though it's been of the more interesting offseasons in recent Flyers memory, it can't end soon enough.
The preseason is always a time when you can see how younger players and prospects fare against professional competition, and implementing in-game strategies before the games start to count in the standings. Coaches can take stock of where their teams and players are at, and make preparations for the full 82-game (or more, if you're lucky) grind.
Dave Hakstol, entering his third season, is no different. By now, he knows the preseason is all about getting ready. And if he really wants to try something different, he should look no further than scrapping the morning skate on game days.
The morning skate has long been a commonplace staple of hockey — almost as much a part of the game as line changes, creative goalie mask designs and the well-timed F-bomb. Getting a skate in on the morning of a game — not quite a full practice, but enough to get your legs — seems like tradition at this point.
Over the past few seasons, though, what was once a staple of the game is slowly on its way out (not unlike the role of the enforcer). Some of the most successful clubs have pushed to get rid of it, and the move has paid dividends.
This past season, the Columbus Blue Jackets set out on a 16-game winning streak, nearly making history by coming one win shy of the NHL record. With a perfect 14-0-0 record in December, they were making a strong case for contention, and helped solidify the Metro as the league's toughest division. The success of the Blue Jackets during that streak wasn't attributed to just the success of an elite netminder in Sergei Bobrovsky, the offensive prowess of Cam Atkinson or the defensive abilities of Seth Jones, though.
While all three categories helped the Jackets go on that run, coach John Tortorella attributed it to a common root factor: getting rid of the morning skate. Via CSNPhilly, 'Torts' explained its role:
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Tortorella told reporters recently. “With our schedule coming up the way it is, we are trying to get our guys out of the building as much as we can.
“These guys are creatures of habit and the routine, but that routine in our league, I think, is wrong as far as these pregame skates and all of the over-coaching that goes on with that stuff.”
Later on, as spring approached and the calendar flipped to the Stanley Cup Playoffs, the Ottawa Senators embarked on a miracle run to the Eastern Conference Final. Powered by Erik Karlsson and the feel-good story of the year in Craig Anderson, the Sens came just a goal shy of their first Stanley Cup Final appearance in a decade.
Led by a new mind behind the bench in Guy Boucher, who had returned to the NHL after a three-year stint in Switzerland, the Senators did not partake in the skate, either. Boucher had made his contempt for the morning skate very much known, according to The Canadian Press:
"Very simple: I hate them with a passion," Boucher said. "It's already hard enough to have enough energy for those players to give everything they've got for 60 minutes that to come in the morning and waste more energy on it, it's never been my opinion."
Barry Trotz, who has helped lead the Washington Capitals to back-to-back Presidents' Trophies, has been known to keep the skates to a minimum. It's argued that eliminating the morning skate keeps players fresher, and more able to keep up with the demands of the full season.
Sure, just because it works for other clubs doesn't mean it would work for the Flyers, as they don't have the star-studded personnel that these other teams have. Make no mistake, these teams would be good even if they skated on the morning of game days, but eliminating the morning skate has still helped quite a bit. How many times have we watched the Flyers begin to crumble because they were running out of steam in the third period? That 30-40 minutes of energy spent skating in the morning can go a long way, especially if it can help them close out games in the latter stretches. In an era of hockey with an increased presence of film study and analytics, perhaps an extra hour of film in lieu of the morning skate can make that significant difference.
Are there times where a morning skate would be necessary? Absolutely, if we're talking about those Western road swings where practice time comes at a premium and getting on the ice in the morning is better than not getting on at all. The occasional here-there morning skate wouldn't hurt anything, as long as it's done when it is needed.
Make no mistake, the Flyers are still a young, rebuilding club. They need all the conditioning and ice time they can get. But the morning skate, which doesn't focus as much on fundamentals, doesn't do much favors for them in that regard. Work hard on the days between games, but save the energy for when they're actually being played and points are on the line.
Let's not forget the origins of the morning skate, either. In the 1970s, when beer took the place of conditioning, the morning skate was a way for players to work off the booze and make sure they were able to take the ice. Today, players are well-conditioned to the point of being fine-tuned machines, and the morning skate to skate last night's beer off is just redundant.
Interestingly enough, it was Fred Shero that pioneered the morning skate during his heyday behind the Flyers' bench. But the game has evolved significantly since then. The Flyers have been instrumental in the rise of the morning skate, and it's not too late for them to embrace the trend of leaving them behind.
