Jim Kelley

Jim Kelley writes regularly on the NHL for Sportsnet.ca and can be heard on Primetime Sports on the FAN590.

Peter Laviolette took over as coach of the Flyers on Decenmber 4.

The coaches keep changing in Philadelphia but the plot remains the same: No patience.

The ascension of Peter Laviolette to the head-coaching duties in Philadelphia makes him the 17th coach in Flyers history.

That's not an unreasonable number for a franchise that dates back over 40 years but there's a pattern to the hiring and firing of Flyers coaches that begs the question: So what else is new?

Run down the list in the wake of the recent firing of John Stevens and the first thing you notice is that with the exception of Fred Shero back in the mid-1970s, Flyers coaches usually win, but they never win the Stanley Cup. Flyers coaches are most often good to very good and more than a few of them have won the Jack Adams Award as coach of the year. But the good ones get fired pretty much on par with the very few bad ones who have handled the job.

Winning doesn't seem to equate to a safe haven on Broad Street. Pat Quinn got fired despite his Jack Adams Award, posting one of the best seasons in the history of the NHL, a regular-season, points-earned percentage of .630 and a playoff-win percentage of .564.

Mike Keenan, who went on to win a Stanley Cup with the New York Rangers, got fired despite winning a Jack Adams, earning a regular-season, points-earned percentage of .638 posting a playoff-win percentage of .561 and giving a demonstrably-better Edmonton Oilers team perhaps, their toughest Stanley Cup final ever, a seven-game classic back in 1987.

Bill Barber got the hook despite a Jack Adams and a .621 regular season points and though he did struggle with a playoff percentage of.273, Barber was considered by many in the coaching fraternity as something of a miracle worker given the talent on hand at the time.

Ken Hitchcock won a Stanley Cup with Dallas but found no love in Philadelphia, getting whacked despite a .614 in the regular season and a .514 in the playoffs.

Roger Neilson, Craig Ramsay, Terry Murray are considered among the best in the league at what they do and were all at .500 or well above it when they were deemed not good enough for Philadelphia.

All of which leads one to at least ask a rather simple question: Will the players ever be held responsible for the failed dreams of Flyers fans and management alike?

This is no knock on Paul Holmgren, the Flyers' general manager, and Director of Player Development Don Luce; they are good hockey people with a long history of solid work in management in the days since their successful playing careers ended.

Still, there is a history in Philadelphia that seems to exempt players from expectations, (real or imposed,) via media perception and one can't help but wonder if it doesn't come from ownership. Principal owner Ed Snider is the only boss anyone in the organization has ever had and he's not without a passion for his team. He denied having any say in the dismissal of Stevens, but then he denied having a role in the then inexplicable firing of Hitchcock, a panic firing if there ever was one.

What's undeniable is that a firing in Philadelphia is not uncommon, but almost expected whenever there are high expectations and somewhat lower results.

Odd when you considered this edition of the Flyers team was vastly overrated by media but not necessarily management types.

I wasn't on the preseason bandwagon that had the Flyers listed as odds-on favourite to at least reach the Stanley Cup finals this season. (Oddly enough, in some people's minds I had the Washington Capitals in that slot in early October.) Still, I was in the school of writers who -- based on the observations of hockey people outside of Philadelphia -- maintained that Holmgren and Luce had done a masterful job of rebuilding a team in very short order but still had work to do. My thinking at the time was they had the same problems in goal that they have had seemingly every season since the death of Pelle Lindbergh, it simply wasn't at the level of the best the Eastern Conference has to offer. Philadelphia goaltending this season has done nothing to refute that.

That too is not uncommon. Just changing goaltenders doesn't always equate with being better at the position. One need only look at the Ottawa Senators and their over-hyped acquisition of Pascal Leclaire. What was thought to be a major upgrade there also turned out to be something a little less than adequate.

There are other problems with the Flyers. Insiders will tell you that players have far too much influence in Sinder's office, especially when Bobby Clarke was general manager of the team. Over the years there have been more than a few knee-jerk reactions to coaches who appeared to the players to be either too tough or too soft or too often stuck somewhere in between.

There are also serious problems on the back end -- another longstanding problem in Philadelphia.

The acquisition of Chris Pronger was a good one (albeit at a hefty price), but Pronger wasn't brought in to be the missing piece of a defence corps on the rise. A more realistic observation was that he was brought in to try and help settle a unit that was nowhere-near good enough to anchor a Cup run.

There are also clear-and-well documented leadership and maturity issues surrounding some of the younger stars on the Philadelphia roster. Captain Mike Richards is taking some heat for that, but this is nothing unusual with a young group. There's often a problem in the room when a young player takes on the captaincy. He has a real transition to make and it's usually one that only happens over time. It's often difficult for young players who came up together to accept that someone "just like them" has suddenly been charged with holding them accountable. It's especially problematic if the young captain isn't mentally strong enough or emotionally mature enough to impose his will on players who were used to him being one of their buddies.

There's also an injury issue in play here -- and Ray Emery is just the latest example -- something that has become routine to the point that you have to wonder about the team's training regimens.

But the biggest problem of all in Philadelphia appears to be the same problem that always manifests itself there: impatience.

There's a decent young team on the rise in Philadelphia. It has holes that still need to be filled, injuries that need to heal and issues that still need to be addressed, but, as is usually the case, the Philadelphia protocol called for changing coaches instead.

One can make a pretty substantial argument that Peter Laviolette will soon come to realize that like so many before him he won't get a whole lot of time to fix what ails the club.

If history is a guide, the same will be said regarding his successor.