The search for the next head coach of the Philadelphia Flyers just got a lot more complicated.
On Saturday, the Anaheim Ducks announced that they have fired head coach Greg Cronin, marking the first vacated coaching position of the 2025 offseason.
The Flyers, of course, couldn’t even make it to the end of the 2024-25 season, as they fired their head coach, John Tortorella, back on March 27.
Tortorella, 66, was at odds with many at the end of his tenure with the Flyers, as his disciplinarian style and stubbornness rubbed one too many people the wrong way one too many times.
Cronin, 61, met the same fate in Anaheim a little less than a month later.
The common theme between the Ducks and the Flyers?
Both teams have young, talented cores with a healthy mix of veteran players, and both teams were burnt out by coaches whose methods do not resonate with today’s generation of athletes.
And both teams, presumably, will be after a young, successful, progressive coach who can help transform their culture, cultivate their young talents, and grow into something great over time.
This leads the Flyers and the Ducks to the NCAA’s top NHL head coaching candidate: University of Denver head coach David Carle.
Carle, 35, has served as Denver’s head coach for seven seasons now, winning the NCAA championship twice and finishing as a semifinalist once. Prior to taking the reins, Carle won a third total NCAA championship – his first – as an understudy to current St. Louis Blues boss Jim Montgomery.
And, with a 179-74-17 record, Carle knows as much about winning as most coaches you can find out there today.
Flyers forward Bobby Brink, a former star at Denver, tried his hardest to avoid directly vouching for his old bench boss.
“I know that he’s had so much success there. He’s a great coach,” Brink said of Carle at his exit interview Saturday. “I think that he’ll do well at the NHL level. He’s not confiding in me too much. I’m guessing he’s going to get interviews, and I think any team would be lucky to have him.”
Brink isn’t the only one putting two and two together, though.
In his latest “32 Thoughts” podcast, NHL insider Elliotte Friedman discussed the Flyers and Carle, noting that the Flyers and other NHL teams will have to make it “hard for him to say no.”
“I think the Flyers are like the Ducks,” Friedman added. “They’ve kind of said, ‘Ok, it’s been enough of this. It’s time to go for it a little bit.’”
So, if the Flyers and Ducks were not already superimposed by the highly-controversial Jamie Drysdale-Cutter Gauthier trade from last January, they are now.
A top college coach like Carle, or any coaching candidate, for that matter, will have to look at the Ducks and Flyers and choose between Matvei Michkov, Drysdale, Cam York, Tyson Foerster, Jett Luchanko, Alex Bump, Sean Couturier, Travis Konecny, Brink, a top 2025 NHL Draft selection, and no immediate goaltending solutions and Gauthier, Trevor Zegras, Troy Terry, Mason McTavish, Leo Carlsson, Pavel Mintyukov, Olen Zellweger, Jackson Lacombe, and two rock-solid goalies in John Gibson and Lukas Dostal.
Despite having coached both Brink and Terry, as well as Flyers prospect Massimo Rizzo, it is clear which team is best equipped to start winning, both now and in the future.
Another thing to consider, from Carle’s perspective, is each team’s respective recent head coaching history.
The Ducks have gone through just five coaches, including interim coaches, since 2011: Bruce Boudreau, Flyers adviser Bob Murray, Randy Carlyle, Dallas Eakins, and the recently fired Cronin.
For the Flyers, assuming Brad Shaw is not retained as the head coach, they’ll have gone through eight coaches since 2011: Peter Laviolette, Craig Berube, Dave Hakstol, Scott Gordon, Alain Vigneault, Mike Yeo, Tortorella, and Shaw.
At 35, Carle is a young guy with a young family. Will he risk his cozy and successful position at Denver for a potentially chaotic one in Philadelphia? Can the Flyers make assurances, and generally, a better offer, than other teams?
By making an offer to Carle to begin with, the Flyers would have recognized they are signing up for a long-term project with a long-term solution, rather than a long-term project with a short-term solution like Tortorella or Vigneault.
But, rest assured, they will have competition from the Ducks and other NHL teams. The 2025 coaching carousel is shaping up to be a crowded one.
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