On Saturday night, with the Flyers/Lightning game still scoreless in the first period, Matt Niskanen committed an egregious turnover in the Tampa zone, leading to a breakaway on the other end.

Nikita Kucherov, stoned by Carter Hart! Then, a little later, a short-handed breakaway for Alex Killorn, and…. stoned by Carter Hart!

I couldn’t help but sit there and think that Ilya Bryzgalov would have let one of those goals in. Michael Leighton, too, and Brian Boucher, Michal Neuvirth, Steve Mason, Alex Lyon, Anthony Stolarz, and whomever else stood between the pipes for this team over the years.

Something just feels different about this group, and you sit there watching them, just waiting for a backbreaking mistake. You wait for a disappointing collapse, but it never comes. The things that were so predictable and disheartening do not seem to be there in the year 2020, pre-pandemic or in this current fan-less epoch.

Think about it –


They took out WASHINGTON, BOSTON, and TAMPA, back-to-back-to-back, to clinch the top seed in the hub city playoffs, and I know the Lightning didn’t have Stamkos and lost Hedman to injury, but still. That’s “bananagrams,” as Kyle would say. It’s a shame that Flyers fans who suffered for the last however many decades won’t get to actually be there in person to cheer them on, even though this team has shown that they can get up for a game “Anytime, Anywhere.” They can motivate themselves, unlike the Sixers, who needed the home crowd to boo them into decent play many times this year.

The funny thing about Philadelphia sports is we talk so much about the “hard-working, blue collar, lunch pail-carrying” mentality of our players that it’s become a cliche over the years. Here come a bunch of dudes who aren’t even from Philly, to go muck and grind and get pucks in deep and get bodies in front of the net and kill themselves playing for people who are going to shred them if they don’t perform to the level of expectation. Some embrace it and some don’t, but we can seemingly put this Flyers group strictly into the former category.

The perfect encapsulation of this team was presented to us in graphic form by NBC Sports Philadelphia, which shows the list of Flyers goal scorers in the round robin group of games:

No Claude Giroux. No Jake Voracek. No Travis Konecny or Coots, or Kevin Hayes. That is INSANE. That would be like Raul Neto and Furkan Korkmaz tearing apart the ’99 Spurs while Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons just set screens and spaced the floor. It would be like Freddie Mitchell carving up the 1985 Chicago Bears while Terrell Owens runs decoy routes and five-yard slants.

At this point, I’ll make a confession. In the last three years of editing Anthony and Russ’s Flyers stories, I’d be going through the copy, seeing some of these names, and thinking to myself, “who the fuck is this guy?” Tyler Pitlick? Robert Hagg? Nic Aube-Kubel? (The same NAK who apparently morphed into 1998 Jaromir Jagr over the summer). That confession may seem ignorant, but for casuals who don’t watch the Flyers every night, or writers who cover other teams, it’s fascinating to think they’ve built a squad with such depth, seemingly out of nowhere. They brought young players through the ranks and made a couple of shrewd trades along the way. They are finding value in the margins, and this might be the least top-heavy squad in Philly sports over the past ten years. They’re actually very similar to the Union, which I think is a perfect comparison for the 15 people who watch both hockey and soccer in this town. Both teams have a bunch of two-way grinders and humble non-stars playing in front of excellent goalies.

The best part about this Flyers squad is that they all seem very likable. No divas. Nobody rolling around with supermodels or sending Bryce Harper-esque messages to “sign this guy” or whatever he’s trying to do with J.T. Realmuto. They seem to go about their business and they seem to actually love the game they play, and if a few of them are assholes, then I don’t wanna know about it.

At the risk of jinxing it, like Eddie Mush in A Bronx Tale, I’ll go out on an obvious limb here and say that this Flyers squad is the real deal. The NHL is on notice, and while Carey Price was hot in the qualifying rounds, it’s gonna be different with waves of blue collar, hard working, lunch pail-carriers coming at him. We usually laugh and roll our eyes when writing out that old cliche, but joke’s on us this time, because that’s exactly what this team is.