“The chain is only as strong as its weakest link, for if that fails the chain fails and the object that it has been holding up falls to the ground.”
Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man
In some form, we’ve all heard that phrase before. I don’t think it rings truer than with our sports teams though. Is there a worse more ominous feeling than one of our contenders going into a season failing to fix an identifiable problem? I get it, sometimes a fix isn’t possible. Other times, the plan is to simply hope the problem either fixes itself or just doesn’t come back to bite us. It always does. I’ve thought about this a lot over the years, and it always kills me when our GMs go with the hope approach rather than a true fix.
The impetus for this article was a comment I received on Bluesky from #1 Hurts Fan about the Flyers goaltending situation:
I didn’t realize it when I was getting depressed about the Flyers at the trade deadline, but he’s absolutely right. Dan Vladar is 19-9 on the year with 6 ties. The backups are 9-12 with 5 ties. I still think the Flyers need a real best player, but this stat really stings. The Flyers needing help in goal is a tale as old as time. They’ve tried to fix the problem in the past, but it seems to always fail in spectacular new ways (Bobrovsky, The Bryz, and Carter Hart). This problem ALWAYS comes back to hurt the Flyers. The worst of it is that Vladar was an afterthought in free agency himself. The Flyers are LUCKY their goaltending has been this good.
The Flyers goalie situation reminds me a ton of the event horizon perpetually backing up Joel Embiid for the Sixers. The problem infamously first introduced itself in 2019 during the incredibly tight Raptors playoff series. Embiid was a +89 for the series, but in the 99 minutes he was off the floor the Sixers were a -108 including -12 in just 3 minutes of Game 7 (WTF). His backups were Greg Monroe, Boban, and Jonah Bolden.1
To the team’s credit, they tried to fix the problem in a big way by bringing in Al Horford. It didn’t work. Since then? It’s been a mess of empty-tanked vets or unpolished rookies on minimum contracts: Dwight Howard, Charles Bassey, Deandre Jordan, Andre Drummond, Paul Reed, Montrezl Harrell, Dewayne Dedmon, Mo Bamba, Andre Drummond again, Guerschon Yabusele, Adem Bona, and more Andre Drummond. Reed and Yabusele were the only ones worth a damn and they let them go (I don’t mean anything against Bona, he’s just still raw). Surprise, surprise this season and in all the previous ones (except last year), the team is miserable when Embiid doesn’t play.
At this trade deadline, the Sixers could have attempted to fix this problem, instead they doubled down on Drummond who, shockingly, still stinks. Of course, backup center wasn’t the only flaw in this season’s Sixers. There is also a severe shortage of ballhandling. What did the Sixers do? Traded away Jared McCain. I won’t relitigate that trade, but I will bring up how the team either failed to identify its problems or identified them and refused to attempt to fix them. We went from a team short on size and ballhandling to a team that’s still short on size and now even shorter on ballhandling. What was once a feel-good experience to start the year now sees the team spiraling into the abyss of the play-in tournament.
The Phillies seemed to realize that they were a bat short this season when they targeted Bo Bichette with a long-term deal. It didn’t work out…horribly. The problem was that there was no pivot. There was and still is a hole in the lineup that will be there all season without a deadline trade. The team is hoping that Alec Bohm and Adolis Garcia have career years to moot this point, but hope is not a strategy. We are still a bat short. We’ve been a bat short ever since Nick Castellanos didn’t live up to his contract.
The most nuanced example of this problem is WR3 on the Eagles. In 2022, the Eagles were awesome in basically all facets with one minor exception. By that year, we all knew Quez Watkins wasn’t any good. Howie Roseman decided not to upgrade what seemed like a trivial position. Hell, we made it all the way to the Super Bowl, looked damn good doing it, and how often does a WR3 really affect a game anyway? Of course, Quez dropped an absolute dime from Jalen Hurts in the 3rd quarter of Super Bowl 57. It would have been first and Goal with the Eagles already up 24-21. The drive continued, but we settled for a field goal and lost by the slimmest of margins. Two years later, instead of keeping Quez the Eagles traded (and probably overpaid) for Jahan Dotson to be the new WR3. In Super Bowl 59, Hurts went to Dotson in the 1st quarter and this time WR3 didn’t disappoint. Dotson caught his deep pass and set up the first TD of the game. As soon as it happened, I thought back to Quez. This is why you can’t have weak links in the chain.
Keep this in mind this offseason for the Eagles and the next time we think we have a contender. Right now, we have a big weakness at CB2. We did last year as well, and it was never resolved. Quinyon Mitchell and Cooper DeJean are All-Pros, but if the next guy can’t defend, it won’t matter at all. Howie fixed a similar problem once, look for him to do it again. The Phillies still have the trade deadline to get their missing bat. Daryl Morey hasn’t fixed his backup center problem in all his years in Philadelphia. No one’s ever been able to bring consistent goaltending to the Flyers. You just can’t expect to win if you don’t address your weakest link.
- Of the triumvirate, only Monroe played. He was -9 in just 101 seconds on the court. ↩︎
Philly Front Office 
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