Carter Hart has been benched by the Flyers.

The Philadelphia Flyers have not had the season that they were hoping for and it now looks like the potential of making the playoffs looks pretty bleak. The Flyers are currently 3 points behind the Boston Bruins for the final playoff spot in the East and with Boston having 2 games in hand at this stage of the regular season that will be a significant gap to make up.

There are a number of reasons that you could point to for the Flyers lack of success this season but it would appear now that the Flyers themselves have identified goaltending as one of those reasons. The Flyers have been riding young goaltender Carter Hart this season but it would appear that has come to an end with head coach Alain Vigneault announcing that he has effectively benched Hart for the foreseeable future. 

Vigneault announced that he would be sidelining Hart, who has not played up to his expectations, and added that he would have the young netminder focus on sharpening up his game over the next several days.

"This is not a rest day for Carter, this is a work day for him," said Vigneault. "We were able to have him skate in practice yesterday, we’re going to have him skate and then stay on the ice and work on his game. Tomorrow is a team practice day, which we hadn’t had a lot. I think you could tell the difference between when we practiced prior to last game and in our game we were able to work on a couple of things and that definitely showed up on the ice. He’s going to skate today in practice, stay on after, practice with the team tomorrow, stay on after. Wednesday he will do the same thing, he’s going to practice it and work with Kim after. We’re going to stay that way here for a little while here. He needs to work on his game. He needs to work harder, he needs to work better. I’ve had a good conversation with him and Kim (Dillabaugh, goaltending coach) about my expectations about his practice habits and him stopping the puck."

It is certainly not an unreasonable move by Vigneault, Hart's numbers have simply not been good enough this season. Over his 22 appearances for the Flyers this season Hart has recorded an ugly 4.04 goals against average and an .869 save percentage, neither of which are the kind of numbers you can have attached to your #1 goaltender.

It will be very interesting to see how Vigneault handles this situation moving forward over the next few weeks.