(Kate Frese/SB Nation)
By Kevin Durso, Sports Talk Philly editor 
As 2017 comes to a close, the Flyers have been a team in all directions lately. With a 16-14-8 record, it’s not difficult to find some areas of concern and in need of change.
The dawn of a new year is typically a time for people to put focus on things they would like to change about themselves, making resolutions about ways to be better. Here are four New Year’s Resolutions for the Flyers.
Emphasize the Use of Young Players
If the Flyers plan is to build a young team, then the only way to proceed is to live and die by the young players already on the team.
The Flyers have Nolan Patrick, Jordan Weal, Travis Konecny, Scott Laughton and Taylor Leier up front. They have Ivan Provorov, Shayne Gostisbehere, Robert Hagg and Travis Sanheim on the back end. These players need to get on the ice in all situations and use it as a learning experience.
The difficulty in doing this is that the Flyers are still riding the fine line of being playoff worthy and out of the race. But they have tendencies and trends that say they won’t be a playoff team this season.
The more that becomes a reality, the more the kids should play and get the experience of handling an NHL workload now rather than spending the years ahead when the team should be ready to win learning on the fly.
Define a System
We often like to look at the Flyers and say they lack an identity. In reality, they don’t lack one. They have one that is in dire need of change.
This is a boring hockey team.
What that boils down to is a system, or lack thereof, from Dave Hakstol. The Flyers seemingly go through the motions of a game. And what happens to a team just aimlessly trying to play the game? They get swallowed up by teams in the neutral zone and the defensive zone without getting high-quality chances and too often get caught on their own mistakes.
It equates to losses and inconsistency. And this isn’t new. It’s been a regular thing.
The easy answer here is to just make a coaching change. But GM Ron Hextall has essentially doubled, then tripled down on his choice for head coach. So Hakstol isn’t going anywhere unless things get astronomically bad. And even in their worst, like the 10-game losing streak the team had in November, a small taste of success, like a six-game winning streak, can be enough to quell the fire surrounding the hot seat.
So what Hakstol and company have to do is get a system in place and get players to buy in. The Flyers looked like a team that had that in October and stopped pushing the pace of play and creating their own opportunities. They are back to waiting for the game to come to them.
In today’s NHL, teams just keep coming at you, applying constant pressure, because every goal has to be earned in some capacity, whether it’s by hard work and positioning or a well-placed shot or the luck of a deflection from a screen by creating traffic in front of the goalie.
The Flyers have strayed from that style after having a really good camp and a solid start to the season, even if the record didn’t show it. Now their record reflects their play, and it isn’t pretty.
Get Back to Basics of Game
Perhaps the Flyers got a bit of an early start on this one. In their final game of 2017 in Tampa Bay, the Flyers focused on getting back to basics with strong play in board battles, better passing and taking advantage of opportunities. Of course, against the best team in the NHL, it still took everything they had on the back end of a back-to-back to complete the victory.
That said, for this team to win and be successful, they need to get back to the basics and stick to it.
It isn’t a difficult task to see a team that’s struggling and frustrated and identify that. You can see how a team essentially tries too hard to make the perfect play to break their slumps.
For the Flyers, that’s how streaky play sets in. They get frustrated and fall into the trap of trying to play the perfect game essentially and think it will take the prettiest play to get out of the slump and back on the board. In reality, it just means working harder to get the greasy goal that can set you out of a slump.
It’s not just simplifying your game offensively. It’s remaining disciplined but physical. It’s letting hard skating lead the way and the rest follow. It’s about getting traffic to the net and generating chances from all angles.
The Flyers had really improved in all of these areas in October, but let that slip in November and December, even through the winning streak earlier in December. They need to get back to that.
Continue to Build This Team for the Future
This is two-fold. The Flyers will ride out the rest of this season and their goal is to make the playoffs. If that happens, consider it a great stepping stone for a young team. If it doesn’t, the Flyers go back into the lottery with a chance to earn a high pick in the draft.
The Flyers will have two first-round picks in the NHL Draft this June. They will free up a lot of cap space with players like Valtteri Filppula and Matt Read coming off the books. They will open up roster spots for more young players like Oskar Lindblom.
This is the third year in a blueprint that may take five or six to come to complete fruition. But in order to reach the finish line, the Flyers need to keep building toward the future.
There are a wealth of prospects to get excited about. Lindblom, Sam Morin, Phil Myers, German Rubtsov, Morgan Frost, Carter Hart. All of these players are probably within three years of making the NHL, many of them closer to a year or so away. So it’s time for the Flyers, who already started to show some commitment to getting young players on the roster this season, to stay the course and add more over the coming year.
