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The Flyers Were Fun for a Few Games… Now What?
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Flyers lost again, 5-2 in Washington. That’s three in a row, though they did get a loser point against Columbus.
It feels like the three-game win streak was a hundred years ago, that stretch between October 17th and October 21st when they started to figure it out and looked like they would climb out of the basement to become at least watchable this season.
But last night was a small TV game. The Sixers were on the big TV. And this tweet stood out to me:
If you’re starting to lose Flyers Clips, what does that tell you? Losing Flyers Clips would be like E ROCK and Monty G saying, “I’m good on the Eagles, I need a break.”
The points are valid, though, so let’s go through them:
“the GM refuses to make an actual move”
Well, he tried with the Leo Carlsson offer sheet. Anaheim matched. Not much you can do there.
If we’re being honest with ourselves, we know the Flyers overachieved a bit last season and might have inadvertently put the cart in front of the horse. There aren’t any clear avenues towards acquiring that 1C or 1D and finding the high-end offensive talent they need to turn the corner. Danny Briere tried to warn us that this team might take a step back in 2026 and 2027, though we didn’t think it would step backwards off a cliff.
“the system is beyond boring”
There are stretches of these games where nothing really happens. Guys skate around. Pucks are flipped into the zone and there’s some mucking and grinding on the boards. Torts would probably rip his hair out watching this team forecheck. The Flyers are largely a low-event hockey team because Tocchet’s system is a risk-mitigating, higher-safety type of system. The stat that I think tells the story is that they only spend 38.3% of the game in the offensive zone, which is 31st in the NHL. 18.2% of the time is spent in the neutral zone, which means 43.5% of the time is in their own zone, and that’s the 2nd-highest number in the league. It’s boring hockey from a neutral perspective, and seems to be boring hockey even among diehards who watch all of the games and still play themselves.
“the ‘veteran’ players suck” / “what the fuck am I watching for at this point?”
They’re not interesting. Sean Couturier is well beyond his prime and has three more years at $7.75 million after this season. Travis Konecny doesn’t really move the needle for anyone anymore, does he? How about Christian Dvorak, Travis Sanheim, and Rasmus Ristolainen? They’ve all had their moments over the past year or two, and Sanheim has come a long way during his Flyers tenure, but the way I look at it, there’s nobody on this team that makes me want to tune in.
Or, to rephrase as a rhetorical question, what Flyers player is a must-watch player? When you put in a good day of work, come home, eat dinner, and then turn on the TV, who do you want to watch? What jersey does your 10-year-old son want to purchase? Matvei Michkov? Porter Martone? Definitely not Tyson Foerster after the year he’s having. Is it going to be Cole Knuble or Denver Barkey or Alex Bump? Oliver Bonk? Bonker?
The thing about the Flyers of the 80s, 90s, 2000s, etc, is that they had guys who made you want to watch. We turned in every time to watch Eric Lindros, John LeClair, and Mikael Renberg. Legion of Doom was must-watch hockey. Chris Pronger 15 years ago. Mike Richards and Jeff Carter right around the same time. Even the Roenick/Primeau years, when they got those guys at the back end of their careers, but the teams were compelling and competitive. Then we had the Claude Giroux and Jake Voracek years, which were just okay. But the Flyers never had an Alex Ovechkin or Connor McDavid or Sidney Crosby – that one bona fide superstar who could carry a franchise himself.
Who are we tuning in to watch now?
Of course, you have to frame all of this with the understanding that the Flyers are probably still in the rebuild. When do they officially come out of this rebuild? What’s the indicator? I think they firmly exit the rebuild when they land the first superstar talent. That would have been Carlsson this year. Danny Briere will keep trying, because they don’t have another path to traverse anyway.
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com