As the stretch run dwindles down and the playoffs approach, the Philadelphia Flyers somehow find themselves in the thick of things once again. Five points back of the final wild card spot with two games in-hand, and five points back of the Blue Jackets for the last Metropolitan division spot, and one game in-hand on them. With a crucial game at home against Columbus upcoming, that could really swing the odds in the Flyers favor if they are able to win it.
But over the past decade, the Flyers just haven’t seemed to win these sorts of games. Matchups that can make or break the team’s season, emotionally charged rivalries, even entire losing streaks that start after the team drops an important game. John Tortorella’s teams frequently faltered down the home stretch to kill their playoff chances, with the most apt example coming in 2023-24, where the Flyers went on an eight game losing streak in late March to put their season to bed, a skid that was punctuated by a 9-3 hammering in Montreal.
Flyers need to win these season-defining games
Going back even further to an admittedly strange 2020-21 season, Alain Vigneault’s 14-9-3 team rolled into Madison Square Garden for the second half of a three day doubleheader against the Rangers, after Jake Voracek won the first game 5-4 in overtime. The Flyers would proceed to get hammered 9-0 in one of the more embarrassing performances in team history, before going well under .500 the rest of the way, and missing the playoffs entirely.
Even last season, a 23-22-6 Flyers team got shutout three games in a row, losing 5-0 to the Devils, 3-0 to the Islanders, and 2-0 to the Avalanche. They went 180 minutes without scoring, and started a season-ending stretch that ended any hopes of turning their season around, which included a five and a six game losing streak in the same month.
Suffice to say, there have been a lot of inflection points where the Flyers simply couldn’t get the job done when push came to shove. And while it is commendable that they were able to sweep the daunted California road trip to cap off a 7-2-1 stretch, they had played themselves into such a hole that doing it was necessary to even have a sliver of a chance. The real stress tests are yet to come, now that they have dragged themselves within shouting distance of a playoff spot. If the Flyers lay an egg at home against the Blue Jackets on March 24, the good work they had done prior becomes a moot point. It is harsh, but realistically, the lack of a dependable power play and their disastrous January stretch has left them with very little margin for error.
But on the flip side, if they are able to go out there and play in a similar manner to how they just did against the Sharks (on the second half of a back-to-back no less), it will go a long way to showing fans, and even maybe some players, that they can do it when it counts.
The Flyers sit at a crossroads where they are exiting their retooling phase, and entering into what will hopefully be a window of contention. Winning these sorts of games could go a long way to proving that the team should actually be taken seriously when the moments get important. The Blue Jackets are no pushover, but they did just lose 1-0 to the Islanders in the type of game that the Flyers are perfectly equipped to replicate.
It seems like this is the make or break moment, and at some point if you want to start turning the page on what has been a pretty disappointing era of Flyers hockey, you need to start having some of these games go their way. They’ve pigeon-holed themselves into a spot where making the playoffs is the only way where they can secure a real positive outcome for this season long-term, since the lottery balls will likely not fall their way as kindly if they miss out by a handful of points.
Even if they are dispatched quickly in round one, it would be a massive achievement for this team to turn it around so drastically and, in the process, win some games that teams in the past failed to.
