Sometimes, it seems as though Dave Hakstol doesn’t realize who the best players on his own team are.

Shayne Gostisbehere, recently recognized by the NHL Network as one of the 20 best defensemen in the league, endured benching and underuse just two seasons ago. Travis Konecny spent time as a bottom-six forward last year. Travis Sanheim isn’t a regular NHL player, and there’s a chance he still won’t see solid ice time this season.

And so, as is Philadelphia tradition, some Flyers fans have begun sharpening our pitchforks in preparation for the day when we can chase the Head Coach out of town. This is in spite of the fact that Hakstol has made the playoffs twice in three seasons, and all three times behind rosters with serious depth problems. Somehow, many fans are so frustrated by Hakstol’s apparent mistakes that they’re willing to overlook his success.

That’s because it’s true! The fans are right; the Twitter takes are spot-on! Hakstol’s decisions, from a vantage point external to the Flyers’ organization, make no sense. Yes, he’s been successful so far, but it’s gotten the Flyers nowhere significant, and the most important years for their core are fast upcoming. Maybe playing Lehtera over Leier or MacDonald over Sanheim doesn’t matter much now, but can we really expect the guy who made those choices to make the right calls as the Flyers battle through longer, higher-stakes playoff runs?

So that’s why people are angry – in spite of Hakstol’s success, they believe that he regularly hurts the Flyers through his personnel decisions, and they see no reason to believe that his decision-making will improve. What’s more, General Manager Ron Hextall doubled down on his commitment to Hakstol at the end of last season, so he probably won’t be forced out of his job soon.

Now, the simplest explanation for Hakstol’s mistakes is that he’s an overwhelmed coach who doesn’t recognize the importance of speed and skill in the league today. Hakstol consistently buries inexperienced, high-ceiling players (Gostisbehere, Konecny, Laughton) in favor of older, low-ceiling “veterans” (MacDonald, Lehtera, Filppula). It could be that he perceives the veterans as safer or more responsible players, and he’s taking a conservative approach to his job. This explanation makes sense, it fits what we’ve seen, and it’s a problem that recurs frequently around the NHL. There’s likely nothing more going on. However, there is actually one alternative explanation worth considering:

What if Ron Hextall is using the Flyers’ current roster as a tool to maximize player value? Specifically, what if he’s insisting on the presence of “veteran” players on the NHL roster so that he can market those players to other teams? Hextall’s ultimate goal is to win championships, and a few contracts still on this roster hamper his ability to do so. He could try to work around those contracts and win now, but doing so would run counter to the message of patience that he’s preached since he first became the GM. And, Hextall probably knows that his best players in the years to come are going to be guys like Ivan Provorov, Nolan Patrick, and Travis Konecny. While the contributions of older stars could be very important in an eventual championship run, Hextall might view the remainder of (for example) Jake Voracek’s prime as being less important to the franchise than building a stellar core around the youth.

If that’s the case – if Hextall believes that the Flyers’ championship window opens after players like MacDonald have moved on and those like Morgan Frost and Wade Allison have joined the team – why wouldn’t he do everything in his power to market MacDonald, Jori Lehtera, and Dale Weise to his competitors? Hextall wants to compile the assets necessary to win as many championships as he can; he therefore needs to maximize the value of all of the assets currently in the organization. While the fans would love an underdog run to the Eastern Conference Finals this year, Hextall might perceive that possibility as being less valuable than a chance to move on from some current roster players. And he can only move those players by allowing them to prove themselves on NHL ice, even if it costs the Flyers points in the standings.

The possibility that Hextall is taking this approach seems more likely when you consider how he’s managed the Flyers for the past four years. Every quote from Hextall going back to his first season as GM suggests that he wanted to be patient about building this team. At first that was virtually his only option, though, because the Flyers were in disarray when he became the GM. The team had swung and missed on a few free agents and drained their pick/prospect pipeline in order to remain competitive throughout the late aughties and early 2010s. As a result, the Flyers of 2012-2014 were crunched for cap space but incapable of icing an NHL team with any depth.

So, upon taking the reins, Hextall preached patience and committed to it. In the first two years of his tenure, he completely gutted the defensive corps, moving everyone who wasn’t nailed down (looking at you, 47) to clear cap space and bolster the pipeline. While a few players traded during this period (namely Brayden Coburn and Kimmo Timonen) were beloved in Philadelphia, the state of the team rendered obvious the fact that their time with the Flyers needed to come to an end.

Out went Coburn, Timonen, Nicklas Grossman, Luke Schenn, and Mark Streit. In came whatever Hextall could get, and up came Shayne Gostisbehere, Robert Hagg, and Brandon Manning. By recognizing his need to retool the defense and refusing to commit to free agents, Hextall built his reputation as a patient manager. He has maintained that reputation by keeping the prospect pool strong and waiting cautiously for his best young players to prove their NHL-readiness. The fans have mostly been behind him along the way – even when skill forward Brayden Schenn was dealt for picks last summer, most people understood that Hextall was still looking into the future.

But now, many of us find ourselves screaming at Dave Hakstol to play his younger, more skilled players, so that the Flyers will wins more games. There are two justifications for this apparent dissonance: First, fans tend to separate the blame for which players join the organization and remain NHL-eligible (Hextall) and which players make the roster and receive playing time (Hakstol) between the two men who run the hockey side of the team. While we understand Hextall’s patience, we don’t expect the same from a coach – their job, as we know it, is to win games.

Second, when the media asks Hextall about promoting prospects, you’ll hear him say the same thing over and over again: Prospects will make the team as soon as they prove that they can improve the team. If this is really Hextall’s approach, that would mean that he considers Dale Weise to be a better option than at least three of Taylor Leier, Nicolas Aube-Kubel, Danek Martel, and Mikhail Vorobyev in the season to come. Because of this possibility, your instinct might be to keep screaming about roster decisions.

But the idea that prospects will only be promoted when they “prove it” has never been Hextall’s central message. In fact, it more often seems like an excuse for his patience than a genuine statement of philosophy. What Hextall actually seems to be focused on is patiently using the NHL Entry Draft to produce great hockey teams annually. The best way to build a great team is by turning your worst assets into more or better assets, and the only way to do that is by marketing the assets you want to trade.

You probably can’t trade Andrew MacDonald even if you prove that he can play 22 minutes per night, but you absolutely can’t trade Andrew MacDonald if the league understands that he’s an AHL player. To me, it’s not insane to wonder if an ill-informed but Cup-ready team would take MacDonald if you retained salary and perhaps even sweetened the pot with a pick or prospect. Chicago, intent on extending their Cup window, just signed Brandon Manning about as quickly as they could. The defending-champion Capitals just paid Brooks Orpik – who is like if MacDonald couldn’t skate and also injured people – to play hockey for them.

The Flyers might be ready now, but we know that they’ll be better soon. We’ve already seen the Rangers’ decline start to bottom out, and the Penguins and Capitals are only going to get worse in the years to come. It makes perfect sense that Hextall would insist on a “veteran” presence on the roster with the concealed intention of marketing those veterans to the rest of the league.

Looking at the last five years of Flyers hockey makes you seriously wonder if that’s what Hextall’s doing. Brayden Coburn, who was never an excellent skater but who already seemed to have lost a step at 29, skated for 19:56 nightly the year he was traded to the Lightning. Mark Streit saw 19:23 per game the season he was traded and 21:56 the season before – he was 38 and 39 years old during those years. Hextall’s summer-long go-to pick for the 3C slot was Jordan Weal, a 26-year-old forward whom the Flyers acquired for nothing. Weal has upside but hasn’t yet proven himself to be an NHL-caliber scorer; if he gets hot this year, he would make a perfect trade target for a team looking for one more middle-six forward. Finally, Pierre-Edouard Bellemare was terrible every year in Philadelphia – Do you ever wonder why he skated for 12:56 per game, and received an Alternate Captaincy, during the season before the Flyers were clearly going to lose a forward in the expansion draft?

Believe them all or not, these examples suggest that Hextall understands the need to market his under-contract players in order to trade them. And while you might have forgotten some of the trades referenced here, or the picks that they garnered for the Flyers, Hextall hasn’t. The first- and second-round picks which the Flyers used to trade up and draft Travis Konecny? Those came from the Coburn and Timonen trades, respectively. As for the other pick that the Flyers got for Timonen? That became Wade Allison, the NCAA stud to whom Hextall has allegedly offered a roster spot already. Mark Streit brought us Maxim Sushko; Brayden Schenn brought us Morgan Frost and Joel Farabee. Hextall’s career as a GM thus far proves that trading veterans to build the pipeline can pay off in a big way. He may not see a guy like Radko Gudas as a 2nd-pairing defender; he probably just remembers the picks that he has gotten for moderately useful and less-than-useful players in previous seasons.

Sure – Andrew MacDonald isn’t Kimmo Timonen, and Dale Weise isn’t Brayden Schenn. But even if Hextall gets nothing at all in exchange for these players, he’s helping himself just by getting rid of their cap hits as soon as possible. His core is going to be deeper, stronger and more experienced in just one or two seasons. Contracts like MacDonald’s, Lehtera’s, and Weise’s hurt him in the short term. Why wouldn’t you play these guys as much as you can, hoping that they’ll prove themselves NHL-worthy in the eyes of other GMs? It hurts the Flyers, sure, but they’re not ready to win the Stanley Cup yet anyway.

Of course, this hypothetical reasoning might turn around as soon as this season. The acquisition of James van Riemsdyk, at a hefty price tag and for a moderate term, suggests that Hextall is almost ready to start competing seriously for a title. Hextall has been talking about the team taking a big step forward this season. If the Flyers have an incredible start to the season, maybe Hextall starts moving things around by this trade deadline.

That probably won’t happen yet, though. It seems more likely that Hextall locked down van Riemsdyk for his chemistry with Giroux, his familiarity with the organization, and what he’ll bring to the table throughout the duration of his contract – not to score goals next season. Morgan Frost and Phil Myers are each just a year away. Carter Hart looms. The MacDonald and Lehtera contracts remain on the books. Hextall and Hakstol, even in the most optimistic reading of the present circumstances, are probably going to force-feed us one more season of the MacDonald, Lehtera, and Weise show before we see the best team the organization has to offer.

While this conclusion about the 2018-2019 season is upsetting, it’s nice to have a rational explanation for some of the Flyers’ most questionable recent decisions – even an explanation which may not be based in reality. This allows for positive thinking about what might be ahead for the Flyers with Ron Hextall at the helm. Because, regardless of your personal interpretation of this theory, these veterans will be leaving the team soon, and Hextall’s won’t pull any punches at that point. The end of the Cup drought might just be on the horizon for a team that was in a state of total rebuild just a few years ago. Flyers fans have every reason to be excited, even if our best years are yet to come.