Welcome to the Weekly Power Rankings–a definitive list of what’s bad (slang for good) and bad (just bad) in the BSH-verse this week.
TOP FIVE
1. Morgan Frost
Frost hadn’t really found his footing at the NHL level across the 77 games he played prior to this season. This season hasn’t been a resounding success quite yet for the 23-year-old, but this week was a great step in the right direction. He had 5 points in 4 games this week, most of them in a 4-point performance against the Coyotes. Frost then scored a goal in Saturday’s loss to the Rangers, as well.
2. Alex Ovechkin
Ovie scored his 800th goal this week, becoming just the third player in NHL history to do so. He completed the feat with a trio of goals on Tuesday, all scored against former Philadelphia Flyer, Peter Mrazek. The 37-year-old scored the landmark goal off a rebound, but an Ovechkin garbage goal still somehow looks really pretty.
IT’S HISTORY, BABES! pic.twitter.com/ENTC23b2E4
— Washington Capitals (@Capitals) December 14, 2022
3. Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022)
The newest cinematic take on the Italian children’s classic is a stop-motion masterpiece from Mexican director Guillermo del Toro that manages to weave in themes of obedience, parenthood, anti-fascism, fatherhood, and more without ever feeling overstuffed. The movie, a painstakingly ornate and incredibly detailed piece of modern puppetry, hit Netflix just last week.
4. Cutter Gauthier
The Flyers first-round pick in July’s entry draft, Gauthier was selected to represent the United States at the upcoming 47th IIHF World Junior Championships in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. The forward has 10 goals and 6 assists in 13 games for Boston College so far this season and he joins Emil Andrae (Sweden) and Elliot Desnoyers (Canada) who project to play in the tournament. Gauthier honestly might be the most exciting piece the Flyers currently have so it’ll be fun to be able to watch him on an international stage.
5. Philadelphians who like options
There are now nine Democratic candidates for Philadelphia’s next mayor: Rebecca Rhynhart, Jeff Brown, Judge James DeLeon, Helen Gym, Allan Domb, Derek Green, Cherelle Parker, Maria Quiñones Sánchez, and the most-recently-announced Amen Brown. And that’s just from one side of our two-party political spectrum; whoever gets the primary win in May will face off against a Republican challenger with long odds.
Honorable mentions to: the Seattle Kraken claiming Eeli Tolvanen off waivers; banana bread at work; James van Riemsdyk’s trade value; Greta Gerwig’s Barbie trailer; Taijuan Walker; and Starbucks employees.
BOTTOM FIVE
- Flyers right-handed defensemen
Chuck Fletcher’s biggest offseason acquisition, South Jersey native Tony DeAngelo, was away from the team, reportedly dealing with a family matter, since December 7; so he only played one game this week. The other two RHDs on the Flyers active roster didn’t score a single point this week—that’s no surprise, of course, because they haven’t scored a single point all season. Rasmus Ristolainen has played 25 games and Justin Braun has played 30 and they’ve recorded as many points as my four-month-old son has. Points aren’t everything, but it’s definitely not good when you spend 500 minutes playing hockey and don’t luck into a single one.
2. Kevin Hayes
One of this team’s veteran leaders and highest-paid players took a seat for the third period of a game that the Flyers went on to win—Thursday’s 2-1 victory over the New Jersey Devils—and then was a healthy scratch against his former team in Saturday’s matchup with the Rangers. Hayes was the team’s leading scorer coming into this decision (and still is after both games). John Tortorella has not publicly expounded upon the move.
3. Robert Zemeckis’ Pinocchio (2022)
Zemeckis has made a lot of great movies in his lengthy career and he’s made a lot of interesting failures in his career, too. Even some of his biggest misfires—whether that be artistically or commercially—have some redeeming quality or something weird and fascinating about them. Welcome to Marwen, for instance, or Beowulf. But his last two, The Witches and this year’s Pinocchio, have been largely devoid of any of that. Zemeckis’ latest wasn’t released this week, or even very recently, but it vaults into the bottom five this week because of the appearance of a significantly stronger piece of work based on the same source material. Del Toro makes Zemeckis—a man with a five-decade career stuffed with huge hits and great movies—look like an absolute when compared, as I feel compelled to do due to these films’ proximity of release.
4. Tony DeAngelo’s jersey numbers on hockey-reference
DeAngelo joined the Flyers this offseason, making 2022-23 his first NHL campaign with the Philadelphia Flyers. But when you hover over his sweater numbers in the top right-hand side of his page on Hockey-reference dot com, it says he started playing for the Flyers in 2021. This is inaccurate. Someone needs to alert the powers-that-be, especially @NYRFan-bunchanumbers on Twitter, to this inaccuracy and see what can be done to rectify it. That someone, apparently, is me, right here and right now.
5. Diacritics
Lukáš Sedlák has three letters in his name that include some type of glyph, and with the announcement that he would be leaving the Flyers permanently and returning to Czechia effective immediately, the number of diacritics on the Philly roster has dropped significantly. In fact, as far as I can tell, backup goaltender Felix Sandström’s umlaut is the last one standing.
Honorable mentions to: scraping frost off my car in the morning; Chuck Fletcher; the muted media reaction to Buffalo Bills fans throwing snowballs at the field; NFTs; the Moroccan men’s soccer team; and Starbucks management.
