PHILADELPHIA — The Flyers signed Dan Vladar when free agency began Tuesday. A third-round pick of the Bruins in 2015, the Czechia native, who turns 28 next month, just completed his fifth season of an unremarkable career that jump-started when Tuukka Rask left the COVID playoff bubble in 2020 to tend to his sick daughter.

Vladar’s save percentage with Calgary last season was .898 in 29 starts, which ranked 32nd among goaltenders with at least 25 starts. He has started just 95 career games.

He is a massive upgrade.

Flyers starter Sam Ersson ranked 45th in save percentage last season, at .883. His understudies were worse — Ivan Fedotov, at .880 with 24 starts, Aleksei Kolosov, at .867 with 13 starts — and neither is expected to be on the opening night roster.

Granted, save percentage is very much a team stat. Goalies with poor defenses and penalty kills operate at a disadvantage, but, objectively speaking, the Flyers’ goalies were awful. Historically awful.

The Flyers’ .879 team save percentage last season was tied for the worst NHL team save percentage in 29 years; the worst, in fact, since the 1995-96 Kevin Constantine edition of the San Jose Sharks.

(Constantine, a hard-nosed former goalie, was fired early that season. He went on to compile a legacy on hockey’s fringes that includes coaching in such outposts as South Korea, Poland, Switzerland, Austria, France and Texas; a suspension in 2006 after he made his Western Hockey League team, the Everett, Wash., Silvertips, eat dinner and ride home in their sweaty uniforms after a particularly annoying exhibition loss; and a current suspension, earned in 2023 while coaching the Wenatchee (Wash.) Wild, for making “derogatory comments of a discriminatory nature,“ according to the WHL.)

Who had the fourth-worst save percentage since 1996? That would be your 2020-21 Philadelphia Flyers at .884. That edition was slightly worse than the 2023-24 Flyers, whose .889 percentage was second-worst that season and would have been either worst or tied for worst in seven of the previous 21 seasons.

So no, this is not a fresh phenomenon.

This is the lingering effect of Snider’s Folly, shorthand for the 2012 trade of Sergei Bobrovsky that was forced by late Flyers owner Ed Snider, who’d fallen in love with the idea of Ilya Bryzgalov, who stank.

“Bob” has since won two Vezina Trophies with Columbus and won the last two Stanley Cups with Florida. The Flyers have won no Vezinas and no Cups.

Vladar won’t bring either to Philadelphia. Not at $3.35 million over the next two seasons, which is overpayment by about $1 million, but the Flyers cannot be choosy beggars.

“Sometimes you’ve got to give in somewhere to entice those types of players to come in,” admitted Flyers GM Danny Brière.

Vladar will, at least, bring a measure of competence they have enjoyed only sparingly in the last two decades, most recently by Carter Hart, on whom the Flyers staked their future.

However, Hart and four other members of 2018 Canadian World Junior team are awaiting a verdict later this month in a 7-year-old sexual assault case, in which Hart provided some harrowing admissions in his testimony. The Flyers said last year, after Hart left the team and before the trial began, that they might be open to re-signing him. Vladar’s arrival closed that door, at least for now.

What sort of door has it opened? A path to relevance, perhaps.

With even the sort of below-average goaltending Vladar provides — the average save percentage was .900, slightly better than Vladar’s — the Flyers, one game above .500 on March 1, might not have lost 11 of their next 12 games, in which they averaged 4.3 goals against.

However, the March madness got John Tortorella fired, an example of addition by subtraction.

The Flyers steadied themselves under interim head coach Brad Shaw, whom I believe should be the head coach, but Brière and president Keith Jones instead hired former teammate Rick Tocchet, who will handle the second phase of the Flyers’ rebuild.

He will do so with some familiar folks.

The Flyers on Tuesday also signed Christian Dvorak, who played for Tocchet for four years in Arizona. He got a one-year, $5.4 million deal, a 25% overpay, but, Tocchet or no Tocchet, that’s the only way the Flyers were going to get a 29-year-old, middle-of-the-road, two-way center to join a team with just one playoff series win since 2012, which was two years before Dvorak was even drafted.

The Flyers also signed 28-year-old defenseman Noah Juulsen to a one-year deal worth $900,000. Juulsen played the last three seasons for Tocchet in Vancouver. He’ll compete for playing time with Dennis Gilbert, a 28-year-old road grader signed for one year and $895,000, and minor league center Lane Pederson, 27.

This all comes after the Flyers traded workaday center Ryan Poehling, a 2025 second-round pick, and a 2026 fourth-round pick to the Anaheim Ducks for 24-year-old left wing Trevor Zegras. They hope to return Zegras to his natural position, center, and they hope he will blossom into the sort of dynamic player that warranted the No. 9 overall pick in the 2019 draft and a $5.75 million salary in this, the last year of his contract. He will be a restricted free agent next summer.

At any rate, less than four hours after free agency began, the Flyers had taken steps forward.

They had a goalie who could relegate Ersson, 25, back to backup status. They had two players who understand Tocchet and his demands and his system. They have a potential linemate for budding star right wing Matvei Michkov. They have forward Travis Konecny and defenseman Travis Sanheim in their prime; defenseman Cam York, assuming they re-sign the restricted free agent, entering his; and captain Sean Couturier is still a dependable centerman.

And none of it matters if they can’t stop a puck.

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