We’ve finally made it, folks! With the long and arduous preseason in the books, the Flyers are finally kicking off their regular season, and doing it on the road against the defending Cup champs. This one should be… interesting.
Stick with us here as we preview the matchup, and be sure to swing by our Discord where we’ll be chatting throughout the game.
Puck drop: 7:00 p.m.
How to watch/listen:
📺: NBCSP
📻: 97.5 The Fanatic
Pregame reading
- Six bold predictions from the writers of Broad Street Hockey. Everything from specific goal totals to what trades they will make. [BSH]
- A new prospect report from Maddie! Jack Nesbitt is rolling in Windsor and Nathan Quinn is staying hot over in Quebec. [BSH]
- And the lineup for tonight is, well, raising some questions. [BSH]
Pregame watching
Projected lineups
Dvorak – Couturier – Michkov
Tippett – Zegras – Konecny
Foerster – Cates – Brink
Deslauriers – Abols – Hathaway
Seeler – Sanheim
Ginning – Drysdale
Zamula – Juulsen
Dan Vladar
(Sam Ersson)
Verhaeghe – Bennett – Marchand
Luostarinen – Lundell – Reinhart
Samoskevich – Rodrigues – Boqvist
Greer – Kunon Gadjovich
Forsling – Ekblad
Mikkola – Jones
Kulikov – Petry
Bobrovsky
(Tarasov)
Storylines to watch
Vladar’s debut
In a bit of a surprising development, for this season opener, we’re going to see not Sam Ersson as the Flyers’ more established netminder get the start in this one, but rather, we’ll see Vladar get the nod and make his proper Flyers debut against a still pretty high-powered Panthers team. It feels, all in all, a telling choice, that Tocchet would opt to give this game to Vladar, and perhaps speaks to where he stands on the pair, how he sees the battle for the top role standing as we come out of the preseason. But no matter how you slice it, this game is going to be a big one — it’s everyone’s first proper introduction to Vladar in a meaningful game, and it’s also the true introduction to the Tocchet-led Flyers, and it’s an introduction that they really need to find a way to get right. It’s a notable vote of confidence that Tocchet has placed the responsibility to help guide that first impression with Vladar, and we’ll see soon how that shakes out.
Curious lineup decisions
The choice to give Vladar the start in this one, though, wasn’t the only lineup decision that immediately presented as a bit of a head-scratcher. While there’s still some positive continuity being maintained up front in keeping that third line with Foerster, Cates, and Brink together, the decision to split up Matvei Michkov and Trevor Zegras after they showed so much early promise together in the preseason feels like a strange move, there’s no other way around it. Now, maybe there’s something that Tocchet saw in the games that he didn’t like and we didn’t see, or something in how things were evolving in the practice settings, or something about the matchup for this specific game made it seem to him that keeping them together would not work on paper. There’s any number of reasonings here, but what it comes down to is this: it better work, because it’s hard to feel that breaking them up won’t end in leaving potential offense on the table.
The rust imbalance
It’s also worth noting that, while the Flyers have been sidelined since Saturday, getting a bit of practice in but mostly waiting in the wings to finally get rolling, the Panthers kicked off their season back on Tuesday — with a 3-2 win over Chicago. This means that there’s a real possibility that the Flyers will have to shake off a bit of the cobwebs after that not insignificant layoff, the Panthers are coming into this one with a bit of momentum behind them. We’re keeping our expectations manageable in this one, with that considered, but it also remains that if the Flyers want to hang, they’re going to have to get rolling quickly in this one.
Most importantly…
Go Birds. Go Phils.
