Give credit where it’s due – the Flyers read all of the stories and tweets about how shitty they were going to be and decided to come out and win three straight to start the season, snapping on Tuesday night a 10-game winless streak against the perennial powerhouse Tampa Bay Lightning.

They did it in blue collar fashion as well, shipping a two-goal lead and then winning on the grittiest hustle play you’ll see in the NHL this season, with Noah Cates turning over Tampa right in front of goal and firing one past Andrei Vasilevskiy:

The Flyers are 3-0-0 despite giving up the first goal in every game this season. Twice they’ve gone down 2-0, only to come back and win OUTRIGHT (Mike Miss voice) in regulation, not needing overtime at all.

I guess we shouldn’t be surprised by any of this. If you sifted through all of the snarky shit that we wrote, and that other people wrote, the consensus was that Torts would at least have these guys in shape, skating hard, and playing within the right frame of mind. They’re 9th in the league with 58 blocked shots, but they don’t particular excel in any one area, which just shows how they’re scraping and clawing and refusing to give up through the early portion of the schedule.

It would fly in the face of fan and media logic here, considering that most of us would like the team to #TankHardforBedard, but it’s also naive of us to think that professional athletes with careers on the line would roll over and die just as the season is getting underway. Guys like Scott Laughton aren’t going to phone it in in October. But to be fair, we never questioned the mental approach of this team, or their innate drive – this was always seen to be a referendum on roster talent, with GM Chuck Fletcher putting together, on paper, a squad that should theoretically be nowhere close to the Stanley Cup. Add in injuries to Coots, Ryan Ellis, and others, and the reasons for optimism were very little coming off a summer where they punted on Johnny Gaudreau because they simply weren’t ready to make that kind of commitment during what is and will remain a rebuild.


The other thing to consider is that the Flyers do this every year. Even when they’re projected to be good, they start out well enough, pique our interest to the point where we’re staying up for the Western Canada road trip, and then they start to fall apart. Just last year, they began 8-4-2 with an overtime win against Calgary and then the bottom fell out with the 10-game losing streak that began a week before Thanksgiving.

All of this amounts to a tough balancing act. Nobody wants to see the Flyers lose, and in a perfect world, they’d be cruising right along with the Phillies, Eagles, and Union. But we also are not stupid, and we realize that this remains a transitional season under a first-year head coach with an out-of-favor general manager hanging on to his job. If you believe that Chuck Fletcher is not the guy, as most people do, then you should be hoping this hot start does not amount to an overcorrection.

At the same time, credit must absolutely be given to this team for coming out, playing hard, battling back, and finding ways to win. They’re really showing this city something when it comes to competitiveness. Travis Konecny looks good. Morgan Frost has a couple of goals. Ivan Provorov and Tony DeAngelo look like they’ve been playing together for a full season already, and Carter Hart is holding steady in a year where we thought the poor guy might be facing a barrage on a nightly basis.

If these guys play hard and the young dudes show some promise for the future, that’s really all you can ask for. We have to appreciate that while knowing this is still a franchise in rebuilding mode.