The Flyers have some impressive wins on their resume this season:

  • They’ve beaten Vancouver twice. The Canucks have the best goal differential in the NHL (+55) and have scored the most goals this season (165).  The Flyers allowed just one goal against them combined in two games.
  • They’ve beaten Colorado – on the road. The Avalanche have the best record on home ice (18-5-0).
  • They’ve beaten Vegas – who, you know, are only the defending Stanley Cup champs.
  • They’ve beaten Carolina, who many predicted to be the best team in the Eastern Conference this season, and although they had a sluggish start, are still fourth-best in the East points-wise and eighth-best in the sport overall.

But none was more impressive than Saturday.

The Flyers flew to Winnipeg to face a Jets team with the  league’s best record. And there was a lot going against the Flyers. Ready for another bulleted list? –

  • The Jets had won eight straight and had points in 14 consecutive games.
  • They were 9-0-1 in their previous 10 home games.
  • They came into the game allowing the fewest goals in the NHL (95).
  • The Flyers were going to be without top line center Sean Couturier (minor injury) and newly-acquired defenseman Jamie Drysdale (illness).
  • The Flyers had played the night before and had to expend a lot of energy to overcome a two-goal deficit and win in overtime in Minnesota, then hop on a plane and fly to Winnipeg to play less than 24 hours later.

There was nothing in the Flyers’ favor. Other than the notion that the Jets were going to be without a couple of their better offensive players  – Mark Scheifele and Kyle Connor – but when you play the Jets, it’s all about their smothering defense. It was always going to be a struggle to score against them, so for the Flyers it was all about being opportunistic offensively and matching their defensive prowess.

Done and done.

Cam Atkinson, who had gone 26 games previously without a goal, scored both Flyers goals and Sam Ersson made 35 saves for his third shutout this season and fourth of his career as the Flyers picked up a huge 2-0 victory:


Think about that for a second. Hard to quantify? Let’s let the Philly Sports Sufferer describe it for us:


Definite insanity.

The win drew the Flyers within two points of the first place New York Rangers in the Metropolitan Division. With a record of 23-14-6 for 52 points, the Flyers are now a top-10 team record-wise themselves.

It’s a stunning development for a team expected to be in the bottom 10 of the league, but give them their flowers, because the Flyers aren’t just winning games, they’re beating very good teams.

So far this season, they’ve played 11 games against the top-10 teams in the league. The Flyers are 6-4-1 (13 points). By comparison, here is how the other nine teams in the top-10 have done against each other so far this season (yay, another list):

  1. Vancouver (5-4-2, 12 points)
  2. Winnipeg (6-5-1, 13)
  3. Boston (3-2-3, 9)
  4. Colorado (6-5-0, 12)
  5. Florida (6-5-1, 13)
  6. Dallas (5-5-3, 13)
  7. NY Rangers (6-4-0, 12)
  8. Carolina (4-6-0, 8)
  9. Vegas (9-4-1, 19)

Safe to say, the Flyers are holding their own, as only Vegas has a better record against the other top teams than the Flyers.

It’s been an impressive start, and it’s been buoyed by a combination of unexpectedly good defense and frankly, some sensational goaltending. Both Ersson and starter Carter Hart have been very good. When you have a tandem where you feel comfortable relying on either goalie in any situation, you are automatically in better shape than the majority of the rest of the league.

There are 36 goalies in the NHL who have made at least 18 starts this season. Of those 36, Ersson ranks third in goals against average (2.33) and Hart is 13th (2.70). In save percentage Hart is tied for 10th (.911) and Ersson is right behind him in 11th (.910).

No other team in the NHL has two goalies in the top 13 in goals against. Only Boston has two goalies in the top 11 in save percentage. It’s crazy to think that the Flyers, who for the better part of the past 40 years had goaltending issues, suddenly have one of the best goaltending situations in the sport.


Also stunning has been the penalty kill – which has been otherworldly. The Flyers have the best PK in the sport. They’ve killed off 86.8% of all of their penalties. Oh, and they are tied for the NHL lead in shorthanded goals as well (10).

Your best penalty killer is always your goalie, but it would be a crime not to recognize the work of the four guys playing in front of the goalie every time they are shorthanded when the team is this good at limiting goals against with teammates in the penalty box.

Travis Konecny and Scott Laughton are utterly superb at the top of the box, being active, aggressive, and creating offensive chances off a situation where they should be few and far between. The four-man defensive rotation of Travis Sanheim and Cam York and Sean Walker and Nick Seeler have been so solid down low.

It’s frankly night and day from where they were even a season ago.

The power play has been dreadful when taking the season as a whole. They still rank dead last in the NHL with a 12.4% success rate, but they’ve now scored a PP goal in five straight games, and the power play had looked a little better in the couple games before that. If they can get that even close to a league-average power play the rest of the season, the Flyers might just be the hardest out in the league.

They don’t have top end talent. As good as they are at 5-on-5 hockey when it comes to puck possession, they struggle to finish too often. But they always seem to be in every game. They don’t panic. They know how to fight back. They’ve proven they can hang with the big boys.

And yes, their schedule is tough the rest of the way. Of the 40 games remaining, 16 are against the teams currently with the 10-best records around them (the nine previously mentioned, plus Toronto) and they do have a gauntlet in March that goes Toronto, Boston, Toronto, Carolina, Boston, Florida and the NY Rangers for seven straight games, which is a doozy, and will likely dictate where they finish this season, but the Flyers have proven this season that no opponent is too daunting.

The fact that I’m writing this post with them being past the halfway point should be evidence enough that the rebuild is going swimmingly so far. And yes, I’ll say it one more time, with feeling –

This whole of this Flyers team is greater than the sum of its parts. It’s the embodiment of what Philadelphia sports fans want from their teams. Yes, they deserve your attention.