A lot has been made of how this current Philadelphia Flyers team might be lacking some conditioning. Youngster Matvei Michkov has been at the center of all of it, of course, but with the likes of Sean Couturier slowing down and more veterans taking a step back, it’s become an underdiscussed and underlying theme to this season.
Well, the team seems to be addressing that issue.
According to New Orleans Pelicans reporter Shamit Dua, the NBA team’s director of performance and sports science Daniel Bove, has been hired by the Flyers.
New Orleans Pelicans Director of Performance and Sports Science Daniel Bove has accepted a position with the Philadelphia Flyers, multiple league sources tell me.
Bove is someone Zion Williamson has routinely credited with his physical improvement and rehab.
— Shamit Dua (@FearTheBrown) February 28, 2026
There has been no official announcement from Bove or the Flyers, and therefore his role with the Flyers has not been clarified, but it is almost certainly in a similar role as to what he was doing for the Pelicans and for other teams in the NBA for several years.
Flyers reportedly bring in top-level performance expert from the NBA
Bove has been a mainstay on NBA coaching staffs for the last decade, working in the realm of getting the most out of current players as a sports scientist after graduating from the University of South Florida with a Master of Science in exercise science. In 2016, Bove got his start with the Atlanta Hawks as an assistant strength and conditioning coach for two years before getting hired by the Phoenix Suns as their Director of Performance, where he also worked for two years. In 2020, he was then hired by the Pelicans as their Director of Sports Science and Performance and in 2024 was promoted to their Vice President of High Performance, the position he has been in until now.
So, it’s safe to say that the Flyers might be creating a new role as a director of some sort of sports science division. In addition to their trainers, the Flyers have two performance coach positions — Brandon Wickett is a performance coach, and DeRick O’Connell is the Reconditioning Coordinator and Assistant Performance Coach. Not the most honed in department like those in the NBA who have several staff members focused on bringing the best out of their star players.
To put a cherry on top of this, Bove is a local and is coming back home to Philadelphia for this new position.
To get more information, since we’re not all up to date on what’s going on within NBA coaching staffs, Broad Street Hockey reached out to someone that knows the Pelicans and Bove’s impact on that team. According to this source, Bove is highly respected in his field and seen as one of the top performance coaches in the sport. He uses a lot of data and technology to do his work, and performance analytics would help him do what he needs to do.
It was described as a massive loss for the Pelicans and a great addition for the Flyers.
There will be more information when the hire is made official by the Flyers, but it will be interesting what the focus is behind the scenes and if Michkov’s lack of conditioning to start the season played a role into this hire (our guess is, yes it did).