A voice inside Ken Hitchcock told him, "Head East, middle-aged man." But of the several available career destinations -- Manhattan, Washington, East Rutherford -- why, all in all, would he really rather be in Philadelphia?

"To be honest," Hitchcock said in the wake of a Flyers preseason victory over the Islanders on Tuesday night, "that came from recommendations of people who worked with Bob Clarke."

Ken Hitchcock's Things To Do

1. Figure out the goalie Is Roman Cechmanek really as good as his regular-season statistics the past two years say he should be? Or is his explosive temperament not suitable for playoff goaltending success? Hitchcock has admitted Cechmanek is tough to figure out, but remember, Ed Belfour won a Stanley Cup with Hitchcock prodding him. 2. Open communication Primeau In recent years, being a captain in the Flyers locker room was a job no one wanted. After a few jousts with Bill Barber last year, Eric Desjardins finally stripped his own "C" off and hermetically sealed it to Keith Primeau's chest. So when it was time to publicly execute Barber, it was left to Primeau to look bad in front of the fans. It also can't be an accident that both Desjardins and Primeau had very sub-par years. Under Hitchcock, however, Primeau is one of a "Select Six" veterans hand-picked by the coach to conduct monthly communication meetings. That should take pressure off Primeau as locker room liaison. 3. Unify veterans From John LeClair to Desjardins and Primeau to Mark Recchi … there are a lot of gifted individuals who, with the exception of one playoff run in 2000, haven't spent a lot of time pulling the same rope in the same direction. Throw in Jeremy Roenick and it becomes a true challenge for Hitchcock. Molding all that talent into a unit that plays with consistent emotional intensity could be his greatest challenge. 4. Make friends with the GM Bob Clarke doesn't tell a coach what to do, but he's a daily presence around the locker room. Despite all the criticisms, Clarke is a good hockey man. Hitchcock would do well to forge not only a working relationship with him, but a close one. Besides, if Hitchcock can't win this year, the next step will be starting over. Personnel decisions are Clarke's to make, but it would be nice for Hitchcock to have a voice in them. 5. Know thyself The shelf life of an NHL coach is shorter than most living things, so it was bound to go bad sooner or later in Dallas. Hitchcock won a title there, went to the finals twice. He also warred at various times with star players. How often he substitutes his new-found diplomacy for dictatorship with this team might determine how successful he is in his first year. -- Rob Parent

Well, it makes perfect sense. Clarke, the general manager and president of the Flyers, is so popular with head coaches that since 1997 he's dismissed five of them.

It is an impressive, eclectic list:

• Terry Murray, fired right after he took his team to the Stanley Cup finals.

• Wayne Cashman, who was demoted to assistant coach in mid-stride of his first season, then allowed to go into a postgame press conference not knowing the media was already informed.

• Roger Neilson, an old friend who was diagnosed with cancer then had a public falling out with Clarke, claiming a promise had been made for him to return to his job, a promise Clarke claims he didn't make and couldn't have kept, anyway. Rather than accept a coaching demotion of his own, Neilson left and was replaced by ...

• protégé Craig Ramsay, who didn't last long enough to even decorate his office.

So in came Clarke's 30-year colleague Bill Barber, who went on to become the NHL coach of the year ? only to be fired amid an embarrassing player revolt less than a year later.

To outside observers, the easy conclusion would be this: Philadelphia is a chaotic coaching hell with a band of star players long accustomed to exerting large measures of operating control. This is the management environment Ken Hitchcock thought was the best place for him.

"The people I talked to felt (Clarke) was a good man who runs a good ship," said Hitchcock, who consulted old Dallas bosses Bob Gainey and Les Jackson, who had worked with Clarke in Minnesota. "He's a good person to work for with the way I coach and the way I feel the game should be played."

But will Hitchcock be left alone to his own heavy-handed coaching devices in Philadelphia?

Certainly he was christened with an encouraging promise -- Flyers chairman Ed Snider publicly pronouncing that Hitchcock would definitely be the head coach at least for the entire length of his four-year contract. For Hitchcock to survive, however, he will have to deal with some long-standing Philadelphia hockey traditions.

In the case of the last two coaches Clarke hired and fired, there were a lot of signs pointing toward veteran interference. All the players said in the wake of those changes were that they just wanted to be coached better -- "directed," if you will.

They certainly got what they demanded this time.

"I barked probably more tonight on people just to see how they responded," Hitchcock said Tuesday. "I'm going to continue trying to turn up accountability here. That's the next phase we want to get into. We're going to be demanding. We don't want to take shifts off and we don't want to take periods off. We want to have as many people on board. We want to be very much a team, and being a team we want to have everybody playing as hard as they can. So we don't want to have passengers, and if there are passengers, rather than deal with it the next day I'd rather deal with it at the moment and see how people respond."

For starters, nobody threw any sticks or left the building early. But give them time.

Meanwhile, consider the cast of characters and variety of issues that now lie between Hitchcock and a second Stanley Cup?

How do you get John LeClair, a power forward with a twice-operated back, to act like a $9 million a year player?

How do you get Mark Recchi and Eric Desjardins to level their respective declines in recent seasons?

What do you do with a goalie in Roman Cechmanek, who ended the season, in the eyes of his teammates, as an oddball who quit on them in the playoffs?

If you're Clarke, you keep the same general cast of characters, adhere to your company's new free agency spending freeze and hire a well-known taskmaster that you know can make everything better again.

"We need a clean slate," Clarke said. "The players might have been very unhappy with what (Cechmanek) did, but they should be just as unhappy with what they did. They stunk in the playoffs."

So it wasn't unusual that Hitchcock celebrated the start of training camp two weeks ago by commencing daily three-hour torture sessions. He said he expects to zero in on every player's conditioning level, work ethic and respective mental states. He will go where all those other Flyers coaches couldn't go before.

And by the way, if you're with him, don't dare be late.

"No negotiation," said Hitchcock said. "(Thirty seconds), then gone. Just go home. Start again tomorrow. You can hear all the excuses you want, but what's wrong with showing up five minutes early or going on the ice one minute early? Why push the envelope? This is really important. I just feel like if you're on teaching time, you're on a three-hour clock here and every minute counts. I don't like the fact that people are late."

From step one all the way through what he claims to be a championship-worthy season, Hitchcock plans to exhibit such an approach. Through his successful years and tumultuous times in Dallas, he earned the reputation of a coach both respected and reviled. But this is a Flyers team that has set standards of underachievement in recent years. Even the players realize they've earned this.

"He's in the ear of every guy on that bench," Keith Primeau said Tuesday night. "It doesn't matter if you're a young kid or a seasoned guy. He's making sure everybody's accountable."

Added LeClair: "The rules are pretty much laid out and everybody's expected to follow them. You saw guys running out of here (for off-ice conditioning sessions), trying to get to the weight room on time. Sometimes if little things slip, they turn into bigger things. It's better if the players have an understanding of that right away. You've got to be responsible for yourself and for your team. To me, that's the way you should run anything."

So much for just lacing 'em up and playing the usual games of preseason shinny. Autumn ain't what it used to be in Philly.

"It's been exactly what I thought it would be," said Hitchcock. "It's a lot of work."

Assuming the players don't revolt before the end of camp, it should be fun to watch the Philadelphia Flyers impersonate the Dallas Stars. Imagine Primeau hounding people like a younger Joe Nieuwendyk. Or Jeremy Roenick capably filling the meaty, wordy role of Brett Hull.

"It's been tough," said Roenick. "But the beginning of the year is always tough. And when you get older it gets tougher. Fifteen years in the league for me, and they're getting harder."

Yet as much as Hitchcock is setting the tone on the ice and in the lockerroom, he'll be working directly with a general manager who never fails to stir controversy with his words, but has probably been criticized too many times for the way he's run his team in recent years. The Eric Lindros divorce(s) and questionable money managing aside, Clarke's follies with coaches isn't entirely his fault. You get the feeling that one or two of those decisions since 1997 have come down from Snider's office, though Clarke does seem to make the easy hire too often.

Then again, this snap decision should be a sound one.

"It won't come easy for anybody," said Hitchcock. "You're facing a team that has had two disappointing finishes the last two years, so you have to build the trust back. They have to trust what we're doing and believe in the accountability. So some days you're soft and easy going and some days you're hard on them.

"This is a marathon, it isn't a sprint."

A marathon for a Philadelphia hockey coach? Maybe the Flyers really are ready for a change.

Rob Parent of the Delaware County (Pa.) Times is a regular contributor to ESPN.com.