Report: Flyers meeting with popular GM candidate on Saturday.

The Philadelphia Flyers shocked the world when they made the move to fire general manager Ron Hextall, a legend in the city of brotherly love, earlier this week and they have wasted very little time since making that drastic move. 

The Flyers have already interview a number of candidates for their now vacant general manager's position and the short list of names already includes some pretty big players in the National Hockey League. When the news first broke it was revealed that long time NHL executive Chuck Fletcher was one of the names on the short list and that he would be joined by former Carolina Hurricanes general manager Ron Francis who has a long history in the NHL most recently as an executive, but also as one of the league's great players historically. 

Both men are to be respected but it's clear that they both bring very different things to the table and the early consensus appeared to be in favor of Fletcher, although neither option really seemed to widely appeal to the Flyers fan base. That being said Fletcher did solve Minnesota's long standing goaltending issues by making aggressive moves in net during his tenure as general manager of the Minnesota Wild and that alone had some fans hoping that he could do the same for the Flyers' goaltending woes. 

Now however we know of at least one other candidate that is on the list and it sounds like he is expected to have a face to face meeting with the Flyers top brass at some point during the day today. According to a report from Flyers insider Sam Carchidi of the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Flyers  are set to meet with general manager candidate Bill Zeto, a man that is currently employed by a rival organization.

Zito is currently an assistant general manager within the Columbus Blue Jackets organization and it seems like he would be a relatively popular pick if the Flyers did in fact attempt to go that route. Zito would be a first time general manager, and rumor has it that the Flyers' want someone with more experience, but many feel that a shot at the big chair is long overdue for the former NHL player agent. 

"I’m team Zito. I think he’s ready," wrote ESPN's Greg Wyshynski.

Zito made a name for himself by negotiating contracts for players like Tim Thomas, Tuukka Rask, Antti Niemi, Kimmo Timonen and James Wisniewski and it's not hard to see why he could be useful to the Flyers very quickly. When you have players like Wayne Simmonds and Ivan Provorov set to earn new deals having a shrewd negotiator at the table certainly would not hurt.

[pub]