Rumor: Hextall hints at the reason he was fired by the Flyers.

The Philadelphia Flyers shocked the hockey world earlier this week when they revealed that general manager Ron Hextall had been relieved of his duties. The news came as a major shock to many not only because Hextall had made some very solid moves during his tenure as general manager of the Flyers, but also because of his legendary status within the Philadelphia Flyers organization as a whole. 

In spite of that however Hextall was still fired at the end of the day and now the Flyers' search of a new general manager is already in full swing, but now the question that remains is why was Hextall fired in the end?  Although we will likely never truly know the full depth of the answer to that question Hextall did make himself available to the media on Friday and shared some details about where things went wrong. Although Hextall did not state as much explicitly it sounds like differences in team philosphy where what did him in in the end, specifically differences with team president Paul Holmgren.

“Where we started four and a quarter years ago, there’s kind of three stages,” said Hextall as per The Athletic. “The first stage for me was cleaning up the salary cap, then you kind of move to the stage where it’s a little bit in-between of how many young players are in the lineup and growing as a team and getting better, then there’s the third stage where it’s like, ‘OK, it’s go time right now.’ I didn’t feel right now that we were at ‘go time.’ I didn’t feel like (compared to) the Winnipegs and the Nashvilles and the Tampas, I didn’t feel that we were quite there.”

Now if you read between the lines a little here it sounds a lot like Hextall may be trying to imply that those above him felt the time to make a big move was in the immediate future, while Hextall himself felt that this current iteration of the team was not yet a serious contender. Now that may be a case of me simply reading too much into his comments but The Athletic's Charlie O'Connor mentioned that at 4 different times during his comments that Hextall stated he had no interest in trading a youngster player in exchange for a player in his mid 30s, something that would certainly seem to add to that theory.

Holmgren himself was not exactly a fan favorite during his tenure as Flyers general manager and if firing Hextall was designed to push this team towards trading it's young talent for a chance to win this season or in the next 1 - 2 seasons I think the Flyers may have misjudged the current state of their organization.