The Philadelphia Flyers have fired coach Dave Hakstol, with the team having lost 11 of its last 14 games.
General manager Chuck Fletcher announced the move Monday, less than two weeks since taking over for the fired Ron Hextall. Minor league coach Scott Gordon took over as the interim replacement.
The last-place Flyers have lost four in a row and are 12-15-4. Philadelphia went 1-3-1 on the road trip Fletcher said he’d use to evaluate Hakstol, the rest of the coaching staff and the team at-large.
Hired by Hextall from the University of North Dakota in 2015, Hakstol took the Flyers to the playoffs twice in his three full seasons, but they lost in six games in the first round each time. His teams were plagued by inconsistency in the form of long winning and losing streaks, and that ultimately cost him his job in his fourth season.
It was not immediately clear when the Flyers would hire a full-time coach. Three-time Stanley Cup-winning coach Joel Quenneville, who was fired by the Chicago Blackhawks last month, has been linked to Philadelphia because of a connection with Fletcher.
Hakstol’s final game was a 5-1 loss at Vancouver on Saturday night and included a curious decision. The team flip-flopped on announcing which goaltender would start after Anthony Stolarz played Friday, and Stolarz left eight minutes in with a lower-body injury.
The 50-year-old coach from Warburg, Alberta, said he felt his players battled all the way through the blowout loss. He added it’s ”not good enough, obviously, because the end result is what matters.”
The end results for the Flyers weren’t enough for a franchise that hasn’t won the Stanley Cup since 1975 and was ready to try to contend after several years of retooling.
Hextall’s inability to speed up the course of those efforts was among the reasons he was unexpectedly dismissed Nov. 26. Hakstol at the time got a reprieve while team president Paul Holmgren searched for a GM who would get to make the call.
Long before Fletcher got the job, the Flyers under Hakstol in 2016-17 became the first team in NHL history to miss the playoffs after having a 10-game winning streak and last season the first to make the playoffs after a 10-game losing streak.
Philadelphia went 134-101-42 under Hakstol, who coached the third-most games in franchise history behind Fred Shero and Mike Keenan.
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