Flyers

Philadelphia Flyers 2026 Postmortem

By Kevin Kinkead

Published: May 11th, 2026 · 11:27 AM EDT

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It’s such a fascinating juxtaposition to consider what happened inside the same building less than 24 hours apart.

On Sunday, Mother’s Day, the Sixers were jeered off their own floor by uncouth and boorish Knicks fans after a largely uncompetitive second round sweep.

But the night prior, Flyers fans showed a lot of support for a team that also got swept by a better opponent:

LOUD "Let's Go Flyers" chant from the crowd…

Not the result they wanted but the future is bright 🙌 pic.twitter.com/Sq1IYXUZV2

— B/R Open Ice (@BR_OpenIce) May 10, 2026

There was no better snapshot of the diverging paths that Philadelphia’s winter teams took in 2026.

The Sixers are old news, a fragile and underachieving that has tried and failed many times to reach the conference finals in the Joel Embiid era.

The Flyers are fresh and clean, and they overachieved with a young squad during a rebuilding or perhaps transitional season under a first-year head coach.

One team is on the come up and has the attention of fans, while the other probably won’t ever recapture the fervor it once had in the couple of seasons before and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Such is the cycle of sporting life in a major North American city.

As fun as the Flyers ended up being, they experienced extremely high highs and extremely low lows during a busy campaign. They looked like a postseason contender early in the year behind Dan Vladar, who played his first year as a #1 goaltender after five NHL years backing up guys like Dustin Wolf and Jacob Markstrom. Without his breakout season and .906 save percentage, they probably wouldn’t have achieved much of anything at all, especially with Sam Ersson looking like an AHL goalie for a large chunk of the season. It was Vladar’s incredible performance in Game 6 against Pittsburgh, a 42-save shutout, that got the Flyers over the hump against a Penguins team that had seemed to figure it out against a fading group.

But they almost didn’t get there, stumbling through January with a ragged 4 wins and 11 losses, limping into the Olympic Break at 25-20-11 with a 3.8% chance to make the playoffs. Vladar was fighting off an injury as the toxic Matvei Michkov discourse ratcheted up several unbearable notches. Thankfully, the break served as a hard reset, and the Flyers played their best hockey between February 26th and April 13th, skipping past the floundering Blue Jackets and Islanders to secure their first playoff berth in five seasons, and ending what would have been a franchise-record postseason drought in the process.

At that point, they were playing with house money, and knocked off an aging Penguins core before running into the buzzsaw that is the Hurricanes. Maybe things go differently if they steal Game 2 in overtime down in Raleigh, but despite being outmatched talent-wise, they battled a lot harder against the Canes than the Sixers did against the Knicks.

Now, to the bulletpoints:

• The young talent is really intriguing. Porter Martone, Alex Bump, Denver Barkey, Oliver Bonk, etc. Plenty to look forward to here.
• Key question for next season: is Vladar a franchise goaltender, or was this a flash in the pan? There’s a LOT riding on this.
• Giving Trevor Zegras and Jamie Drysdale new deals is the first offseason priority. They’re restricted free agents who made $5.7 and $2.3 million this year.
• Rasmus Ristolainen was retained at the deadline and played well in his first postseason. He has one more year on his contract and is 31 years old, so they can’t kick the Risto can down the road for much longer.
• Travis Konecny disappointed in the postseason after leading the team with 68 regular season points. He talked all year about wanting to finally get back into the playoffs, and then did little when he finally got there.
• Sean Couturier played really well in the postseason. Not so much in the regular season, though. It’s gonna be interesting to see which version of him shows up next year.
• Michkov being healthy scratched twice in the playoffs is not great, especially the second time it happened. The first one? Fine. Second one? Not so much. And when he was in there, he was largely ineffective outside of Game 2 OT against the Canes and some limited looks on PP2. The good thing is that he looked much better in the regular season after the Olympic break, and if he’s in good health and fitness at the beginning of next season, we’ll truly find out whether he can be effective in Rick Tocchet’s system. I don’t think it’s crazy to say that Michkov does not appear to be Tocchet’s type of player. In fact, I think it’s very obvious based on everything that was said publicly this year. It’s gonna be a big thing for Danny Briere to navigate as he tries to build this thing to the next level. If they can’t make it work, it’s gonna be disappointing, but they can trade Michkov for assets to pursue a 1C or a 1D and we’ll all move on with our lives.
• Maybe an ironic segue, but they need high-end offensive talent. Not exactly a hot take, but in the postseason they didn’t have anybody to put the puck on his stick and make a play. Owen Tippett had some north/south flashes against the Penguins, and his injury absence from the Carolina series was a bummer. As much as they showed on defense, and in the goaltending and effort departments, they’re really lacking offensively.
• The power play…. oh boy! They need to tear it down entirely and spend hours working on this. It’s the #1 thing holding them back.
• The money for Cam Atkinson, Kevin Hayes, and Scott Laughton is officially coming off the books. They don’t have any retained salary or buyout money on the cap sheet moving forward.
• Unfortunately, the free agent market is not robust. In fact, it totally stinks. It’s top loaded with aging goaltenders and guys like Evgeni Malkin/Kevin Hayes and then guys like Cale Makar and Jason Robertson, who will re-sign with their teams. It’s a totally underwhelming class, so much so that it’s probably better for Briere to hold off entirely vs. overpaying for somebody like Darryn Raddysh. If anything, it might be better to do another Howie Roseman type of “prove it” deal, not dissimilar from going after David Jiricek at the deadline.

Bottom line, the Flyers are compelling again. They’re worth following and paying attention to. It’s been a while since we’ve been able to say that.

But the reality is that the front office has a ton of work left to do, and the path forward is not linear. Expectations should be managed accordingly because this team overachieved in 2026. You don’t want to fall back into the same bad habits of overpaying for aging free agents and throwing away assets for nothing. The Flyers are on the right path and need to keep the ship steady.