After a quick trip up to Boston to begin the week, the Flyers are back on home ice tonight for their penultimate tune-up of the preseason. And with some clarity beginning to come through on the status of the remaining key lineup battles, tonight may well be seeing the Flyers icing the closest thing possible to their opening night lineup. We’ll see how that goes for them.
Puck drop: 7:00 p.m.
How to watch/listen:
📺: NBCSP
📻: 97.5 The Fanatic
Pregame reading
- We’ll get into a bit more of this shortly, but Rick Tocchet sure has made Some Choices when it comes to tonight’s lineup. [BSH]
- Jack Nesbitt might not still be hanging around in NHL camp, but he did pick up one pretty critical tip while he was here. [BSH]
- You know who is still around though? Adam Ginning, and he seems to have made a fan in Tocchet, that’s for sure. [BSH]
Pregame watching
Projected lineups
Philadelphia Flyers
Tippett – Zegras – Michkov
Grebenkin – Couturier – Konecny
Foerster – Cates – Brink
Deslauriers – Dvorak – Hathaway
York – Sanheim
Seeler – Drysdale
Ginning – Zamula
Ersson
(Vladar)
New York Islanders
Lee – Barzal – Palmieri
Heineman – Horvat – Duclair
Shabanov – Pageau – Holmstrom
Cizikas – Ritchie – Tsyplakov
Pelech – Pulock
Romanov – DeAngelo
Schaefer – Mayfield
Sorokin
(Rittich)
Storylines to watch
In with the new
The Flyers have brought together a full NHL lineup for tonight’s matchup, and while this might well be the group that they’re working with when the season opens up, it’s clear that they’re still looking for the right alignment of that group as they go. The budding chemistry between Trevor Zegras and Matvei Michkov is undeniable, but the Flyers are still trying out some different looks on that line to see who the best fit is as the third player on that line. On Saturday, they tried out Christian Dvorak in that role, to reasonably positive results, but the team isn’t just going to rest on their laurels with that. Instead, they’re going to try Owen Tippett on that left side tonight, and we’ll get to see what that line looks like with a bit of an extra burst of speed. There’s no rush to find this perfect mix, but the early flexibility they have to work with is keeping things interesting.
But also still in with the old
That said, there’s still a bit of an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” thing going on in the lineup as well. That is, after showing some real pop in their first game back together up in Boston, a nice ability to keep the ball rolling after equally finding success in the last season, the trio is Tyson Foerster, Noah Cates, and Bobby Brink is back together again tonight. To date, this line has brought a pretty perfect blend of checking ability and offensive finesse (they combined for a goal right off the hop in that first showing on Monday), and it’s turned them into a dependable combination for the Flyers, and they’ll be hoping that some continued success will turn them into an outright mainstay. That’s all a bit of a lengthy process to get to that point, of course, but the first step is just keeping things moving in the right direction, as they have up to this point.
Evaluation by absence
While the state of the Flyers’ defense seems pretty well set — after this most recent round of cuts, it looks like the Flyers intend to use Adam Ginning as the stopgap until Rasmus Ristolainen is ready to return, while Noah Juulsen and Dennis Gilbert are left fighting still for the seventh defenseman role — up front, there remains some uncertainty. Both Rodrigo Abols and Jett Luchanko have put together reasonably solid camps so far (and Abols even more than reasonably solid) and seemed well in position to continue fighting for NHL jobs to the very end, but tonight they’ll be watching from the press box, and giving a look to others in the lineup. By this point, these two likely have done just about all that they can within their own power to earn those spots, and whether that was enough, we’ll likely soon see. In the meantime, the question here will be answered regardless — are the Flyers a better team with or without Abols and Luchanko in the lineup?
