Kevin Dupont

By the sounds of it, Bobby Clarke has some serious soul searching to do.  Burned out (his words) and confused (his stated state of mind), he announced Oct. 22 that he no longer felt fit or worthy to be the Philadelphia Flyers’ general manager.

“The decisions that had to be made,” said a sullen 57-year-old Clarke, the gap-toothed icon of Broad Street Bullies, “I was not willing to make them.”

The same day, Ed Snider, the aging chairman (read: owner) of the Flyers, announced it was time to fire head coach Ken Hitchcock, who just more than a month earlier agreed to a two-year contract extension to carry him into the spring of ‘09 at a salary of $1.1 million a year.

The 54-year-old Hitchcock, who directed Dallas to the Stanley Cup in 1999, had been tuned out by the Flyers players, according to the 73-year-old owner.

Hitch, not surprisingly, begged to differ with his senior citizen boss.

“You have to look deeper,” said Hitchcock, “a lot deeper — if you are willing to do it.”

Hitchcock didn’t come out and say that the owner should find himself a mirror, but it was clear to whom he was directing his suggestion of self-introspection.  If Snider missed it, and he probably did, then it only confirmed what Hitchcock said.  Maybe the coach wasn’t perfect, and neither was Clarke, but the Flyers are imperfect for many reasons, including an owner who should have seen long ago that his favorite ex-player was losing his grip on the job.

In June, when he stepped to the podium at the NHL draft in Vancouver, Clarke drew some chuckles when he forget the name of his club’s top draft pick (Claude Giroux). In retrospect, it wasn’t so funny. As Clarke noted upon resigning, he had shoveled many of the day-to-day responsibilities to his top aid, Paul Holmgren, because he simply had lost his zest for the job.  Based on his cerebral slip at the draft, he also was suffering either short-term memory loss, or was struggling to focus on the job’s simplest details.

“I felt I should have recognized it earlier,” Clarke said the day he announced he was stepping down, noting that he first recognized serious signs of burnout at the draft in June. “I realized I was a bystander.”

Clarke’s teams often mirrored his own game, tough and hard-nosed, but they also contained a perennial flaw in the form of goaltending. Had Clarke been on his game, so to speak, in the hours leading up to the June draft, perhaps he could have cobbled together a deal with Florida that would have landed Roberto Luongo in Philadelphia instead of Vancouver. If so, the Flyers assuredly would have started 2006-’07 much better than 1-6-1, and both Clarke and Hitchcock would still be on the job at the distant south end of Broad Street.

Over the years, Clarke missed out many times on good goalies. If not Luongo, why not Miikka Kiprusoff?  Or how about Dominik Hasek or Nikolai Khabibulin?  Might Curtis Joseph have ended that Cup drought that now is running on to 32 years?  Perhaps.

Snider, in his impatience, now has the Flyers changing on the fly. Holmgren, named interim GM the day Clarke resigned, is eminently capable of keeping the seat warm in the corner office. Frankly, given the restrictions of the salary cap, there may not be much more he can do.  If he goes out and lands a top-rate goalie, and massages away a current high salary or two, he may even make enough points these next few months to land the job full time.

But will rookie head coach John Stevens, highly successful with the the Flyers’ AHL (Phantom) affiliate, radically change this club’s fortunes?  Highly doubtful.

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Without that top-line goalie, and with team captain Keith Primeau retiring before the start of the season, this is a team that must rely far too heavily on the aging likes of new captain Peter Forsberg (now 33, and playing on the ankles of an octogenarian). The third and fourth lines are thin.  The defensive corps is slow. The netminding of Robert Esche and Antero Niittymaki is, at best, suspect.  

All of those deficiencies point not to the coaching office, but to the one vacated by Clarke, and by extension, the owner’s office.  Snider is in that select group of people — let’s call them, oh, owners — who never fire themselves. Never going to happen, of course. But when Clarke took the self-inflicted hit, the owner’s mistake was not recognizing that as the first step in getting better is fixing the roster.  He then should have reaffirmed Hitchcock as head coach, with the hope that Holmgren, in time, could have added some speed to that plodding backline and added a No. 1 goalie (Evgeny Nabokov, anyone?).

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For now, chaos reins for a franchise that turned on-ice chaos into an art form in the ’70s, when the Flyers scrapped, clawed and brawled their way to back-to-back Cups.  

Clarke, for all his blind spots in roster building, forever will be remembered as the face of those Broad Street Bullies, as well as the tone of melancholia that was pervasive the day he resigned.

“I’ll die a Flyer,” he said.

On Oct. 22, a piece of the franchise died upon his departure.  

Now it’s time or Snider to show that he’s not intent on killing the entire product.