Flyers' focus shifts to prospect pipeline and Calder Cup Playoff run

In 1996, John Tortorella's Rochester Americans won a seven-game series against the Portland Pirates to claim the American Hockey League's Calder Cup. It was Tortorella's first of only two seasons as the head coach of the club - he had been a Buffalo assistant for six years prior and then became an assistant coach for the Phoenix Coyotes - but the effect it had on the Sabres' players was something that stuck with him, even to this day.

"I watched players go through a playoff run and it just catapults them to the National Hockey League," Tortorella said last month. "I watched a goaltender do that; I watched a couple of other players that it really gave them a good foundation. It's such a great training league to get players to the National Hockey League. [So] it's very important that Lehigh Valley get a good run in the playoffs."

The AHL has been around for 87 years, and is widely considered to be the second-best hockey league in the world behind the National Hockey League. But for decades, it has been focused on being a developmental league for the NHL. Today, with development more important than ever in an NHL team's fortunes, success at the AHL level can often forecast which teams will be at the top of the NHL standings a few years down the road.

The Flyers last saw sustained success at the AHL level in the late 1990s and early 2000s when they founded the Philadelphia Phantoms to play at the Spectrum in 1996. The Phantoms were division champions in each of their first three seasons, including a Calder Cup championship in 1998, and the likes of Vinny Prospal, Brian Boucher, Andy Delmore, Ruslan Fedotenko, and others helped support the Flyers' playoff runs of that same era.

Later on, Jeff Carter, Mike Richards, R.J. Umberger, Dennis Seidenberg, Joni Pitkanen and Antero Niitymaki were part of 100+ point teams in 2003-04 and 2004-05, winning a Calder Cup in 2005 before going on to form the foundation of the Flyers' conference finalist team in 2008 and its Stanley Cup finalist club in 2010.

The trend, however, can be spotted leaguewide over the last two decades that the AHL has been the NHL's sole top developmental league following the dissolution of the International Hockey League in 2001. Tampa Bay, for instance, can find the roots for its success over the past decade in deep runs for its AHL affiliates, which won a Calder Cup in Norfolk in 2012 and reached the finals in Syracuse in 2013 and 2017.

The decade of success that the Washington Capitals had from 2008 until their Stanley Cup in 2018 grew from that of the Hershey Bears, who reached the Calder Cup Finals four times in five years from 2006-10 and won three of them, while also reaching the Final in 2016. And before the Penguins won the four Stanley Cups of the Sidney Crosby era, their affiliate in Wilkes-Barre/Scranton reached the Calder Cup Finals in 2001, 2004 and 2007.

And there are more recent examples too. Dallas reached the Stanley Cup Final in the 2020 COVID bubble in Edmonton, a trip that was preceded by two Finals appearances in the previous six years for their AHL affiliate, the Texas Stars, one of which was a win. Toronto's affiliate won the Calder Cup in 2018. And while the AHL was upended by COVID like the rest of humanity - the league did not award the Calder Cup in 2020 or 2021 - the last two championships, in 2019 and in 2022, have both been won by Carolina's affiliate. It's no coincidence that the Hurricanes are where they are headed into this postseason.

One caveat is that not all AHL teams are run quite equally. Some are owned and operated by the NHL affiliate, meaning the NHL team provides all players, staff, and other resources for the AHL club. Others are privately owned and have an affiliation agreement that calls for the NHL team to provide a certain amount of players and staff, while the remainder is signed and paid by the AHL franchise. The Flyers' relationship with the Phantoms is a hybrid of those - the Flyers control all hockey operations aspects of the Phantoms, including all staff and all player signings, but the business operations side is privately owned.

But one of the relative constants over the years is that winning breeds winning - and that's not just limited to a championship. Successful Stanley Cup runs are half luck, and Calder Cup runs aren't far off. So an organization consistently positioning itself for a solid playoff run, where anything can happen, is the basic goal. That's why the Flyers made it an organizational priority for the Phantoms to get in the playoffs this year for the first time since 2018. It's everyone's hope that it becomes contagious, and sets both the Flyers and Phantoms up for success over the rest of the decade.