
At the Philadelphia Flyers Charities Carnival on Sunday — the first time it had been held since February 2020 — it wasn’t Comcast Spectacor chairman and team governor Dave Scott making the rounds and chatting up those involved with the event. It was newly hired CEO Dan Hilferty, along with Spectacor Sports and Entertainment CEO Valerie Camillo, who was shaking hands and starting conversations.
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Scott’s absence and Hilferty’s presence makes a lot more sense now.
On Monday morning, Comcast Spectacor announced what had been rumored for weeks — that Scott would be retiring from his remaining positions with Spectacor, after relinquishing the CEO role to Hilferty in mid-February. On April 17, he’ll officially step down as chairman of Comcast Spectacor; on July 1, he’ll relinquish his spot as team governor, though that’s mostly for logistical reasons rather than any hint that he’ll retain serious influence over the summer.
Starting on April 17, Hilferty will essentially take over both roles. It’s his show now.
When Hilferty was hired, it originally appeared that his focus would largely be on the business side of the operation — specifically, using his vast contacts in the Philadelphia business community with the aim of helping to build up the area surrounding the Wells Fargo Center. After all, Hilferty has long been a power player on the city scene, spending 10 years as CEO of Independence Blue Cross, and chairing the 2026 Philadelphia World Cup committee, which successfully nabbed host city status (along with 10 other U.S. cities) in 2022.
But Scott’s tenure was winding down. My read is that the team’s struggles of the last few years have worn him down — he was very much expecting Ron Hextall’s talent accumulation strategies followed by Chuck Fletcher’s more win-now pivot to lead to a stretch of a yearly contention, and that very much looked to be the case in 2019-20. Instead, it all fell apart, and suddenly the Flyers were facing an extended rebuild, with Scott in his 70s and unlikely to see the fruits of it. Scott very much made the final call to remove Fletcher, but in retrospect, it very much plays as a final housecleaning to set his successor Hilferty up in a position to remake the organization as he sees fit.
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It’s easy to understand why fans have been livid with ownership for the past few years, and why the “sell the team!” cries have gotten louder and louder as the team has slipped further into irrelevancy. Comcast Spectacor was largely content to take a wait-and-see approach to the situation as it got worse, so it makes perfect sense that fans would decide that if Comcast wouldn’t address the situation, perhaps the last hope was that new ownership would come in and make those much-needed changes to get the club back on track.
That said, in terms of core sports team ownership priorities, Comcast Spectacor has had the right ones: they have an open checkbook and rarely meddle in hockey affairs.
They spend a ridiculous amount of money on the team, from player salaries to off-ice personnel to arena upgrades. Unlike some other NHL ownership groups, Comcast has never been cheap when it comes to the Flyers. Nor do they do a ton of meddling. Sure, they’ve poked their noses in from time to time, pushing Hextall to be more aggressive at the end of his tenure and blanching at the idea of a rebuild for far too long at the end of Fletcher’s tenure. But even those “meddles” were at least in part influenced by the opinions of “hockey people” in the organization. For the most part, Comcast has trusted the hockey decision-makers to build the team, and given them a blank check to do so.
That’s what fans should want in an owner. The problem in this case? The Flyers owners hired and were listening to the wrong hockey people.
Is that a problem? Absolutely. Worthy of anger? No doubt. But it’s more of a fixable problem than, say, convincing a lifelong tightwad to actually spend money. Or get an embarrassment-a-minute owner of the Dan Snyder variety to stop meddling in team affairs and being a general embarrassment at every turn. The solution wasn’t necessarily for Comcast to sell the team. It was to convince Comcast to hire more effective hockey team builders.
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It will now be Hilferty’s job to do just that.
So what changes in short term? It’s important to remember that when Scott took over for Ed Snider, he was far from a hockey expert. The implementation of Bill Barber as a senior adviser, for example, was long explained by those close to the old guard as getting Barber to essentially teach Scott the finer points of hockey. It makes sense that Scott would then trust the advice and judgment of said teacher and his inner circle of former Flyers when making big decisions.
Hilferty, on the other hand, doesn’t need to be “taught” hockey. He’s a lifelong Flyers fan who grew up in South Jersey. Sure, he may not have played the game at an NHL level. But he’s not going to need a crash course in Hockey 101. He knows the game and cares about it. He won’t need to lean on the old guard the same way that Scott felt like he needed to do.
That’s not to say that Hilferty won’t respect the senior advisers — Barber, Bob Clarke and Paul Holmgren. Some (or all) might even remain in their current positions at least in name. After all, Hilferty grew up watching these guys and cheering for them. He’s not going to unceremoniously kick them out of the organization. But my read is that they won’t be the guiding influence anymore, even if they’ll still be revered for their long tenures and love for the organization. Hilferty’s “hockey guy” isn’t likely to be Barber — it will be whoever Hilferty and Comcast picks as president of hockey operations to serve as the bridge between ownership and the front office in Voorhees.
Hilferty is also much more of a natural media presence than Scott ever was. It’s not that Scott had bad intentions, but he was prone to tone-deaf asides, such as when he praised nonentity Gerry Mayhew to kick off the infamous “aggressive retool” news conference in the wake of the team’s 13-game losing streak. Hilferty isn’t Snider — no one will be — but he’s a far more energetic presence. Don’t expect Hilferty to go radio silent and ignore media requests for 13 months as Scott did while the Flyers burned this past year. It would be a surprise if Hilferty wasn’t significantly more active in terms of pitching his vision for the Flyers and using his lifelong fandom of the team as a way to exude credibility with the fan base.
As for further organizational changes under Hilferty — yeah, they’re coming. That was abundantly clear the minute that Fletcher was relieved of his duties, and I reported as much earlier this month. Expect further shakeups to come over the next few months.
That said, the sense I do get is that Hilferty is very much on board with Daniel Briere as the ultimate choice for general manager and John Tortorella as the head coach, so don’t expect that to change with his elevation. This section from Hilferty in the news release announcing his promotion was very telling in that regard.
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“Our number one goal for the Flyers will be to consistently compete for the Stanley Cup,” it reads. “It is going to be a process that will take time to get on that path, but I’m confident we are headed in the right direction with Danny Briere as interim GM, Coach Tortorella, and our hiring of a President of Hockey Operations soon.”
Briere is still very much the odds-on favorite to nab the full-time GM position. And Torts isn’t going anywhere either. Hilferty likes the old-school/new-school dynamic between the two, and now the focus turns to finding a third voice as president of hockey operations to complete the new triumvirate in terms of hockey decision-making power in Philadelphia.
But that will be far from the only decision that is made regarding the structure of hockey and business operations over the next few months. This is a key window for Comcast, with the fans demanding serious change. If they want to remake the organization, this is the time to do it. Fletcher is gone. The man in charge at the top is no longer immediately beholden to Flyers culture and the senior advisers who have provided a guiding presence since Snider’s death.
This is Hilferty’s chance to take advantage of his status as an outsider, absent blame for the current state of the Flyers. At 66, he’s no stopgap — he’ll likely be running the show for quite a while. If Hilferty chooses, he can make significant changes to how the Flyers do business and how they construct their team. The coming months and years will determine whether he successfully takes up that mantle, and truly puts his stamp on the organization as a whole.
(Photo of Dave Scott: Len Redkoles / NHLI via Getty Images)
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