Since the Flyers went up 3-0 against the Penguins last week, one of the prevailing narratives around the team was a reminder of how difficult it is to put away a series completely, particularly against a veteran team like that Penguins squad. When the Flyers delivered a flat showing in Game 4, and when they failed to complete their comeback in Game 5 to come away with the win, that fact was driven home as clearly as could be. Their fate was still in their own hands, but this task would be as difficult of one as they faced all season.
What unfolded was something of a strange game — the Flyers were bringing better pace and creating more looks but not capitalizing on them, nor were they capitalizing on the chances off of mistakes that the Penguins were handing to them, meanwhile the Penguins were also striking out on their attempts to put away one of the chances they were piling up as the game went on. For their own parts, the goaltenders on both sides were locked in and delivering games of their lives, but it remained that the quality of chances was not so high as they’d seen earlier in the series.
Ultimately, it would take overtime to settle this game, and as we well know by now, it was defenseman Cam York who was able to play hero, in the end.
It was an understandably massive moment for the team, but in the heat of this moment, there was an acknowledgment that this was the culmination of a full season’s worth of hard work and bonding together as a group. The team’s young core is moving into a new era, and while they spent much of this season taking in all of the good and bad and difficult lessons tossed at them over the course of this long season, the Flyers never had anything less than complete doubt that they could get this thing done.
“There was never a doubt,” goaltender Dan Vladar asserted after the game. “If somebody had a doubt, it’s their problem. It’s not, that’s not us. We all believe that we can do it. And for me, it was nothing was changing, you know. You know, as I said, before the series, I cannot try to stop the park harder. You know, I can still continue to do the same thing, still being positive because, you know, and be a good person because I feel like good things happen to good people and we are good people in here. So, we deserve this.”
It’s taken a lot for the Flyers to get to this point, and it would have been easy, during their most difficult stretch of the season leading into the Olympic break, to begin to turn on each other in frustration and really let the room fracture, but that banding together allowed them to keep this thing on the rails, and to keep building their game back up to something they could drive straight into the postseason.
The group as a whole is tight, to be sure, but the closeness of their contingent of young players has been particularly notable, and their quickness to bond together has made all of them better. And in that, too, there’s a good lesson.
“When you got Porter Martone’s 19 and [Barkey], you know,” head coach Rick Tocchet explained postgame, “I think [Barkey] like really had a good game tonight. Those guys, you know, [Michkov] is a young kid, you know, [Bump, as well]. Now we got a group of guys, you know, by them being a pack, it might help, you know, them being a pack to kind of, it’s not just we have a couple young guys, we have a a bunch of them. So maybe that’ll help the mental part of the game, too.”
That these young players, still learning the league and what it takes to build their success over the course of a long season, much less push it into the postseason, have such a robust group of peers to lean on has undoubtedly been a difference maker for them. A young team such as this one can make for some rough moments as they work through the finer points of the professional game, but having each other to left them up in those challenging moments has helped to build up more quickly their well of resilience.
“They, like I told you guys, this is a close group,” Tocchet went on, “This is a pack of guys that go out for dinner and stuff and I think that helps. Yeah, it gets tight out there, right? You know, they come back. Penguins, you know, they played a great game tonight. We hung in there. I got to give them a lot of credit. I think the closeness might have won us the series, you know. They’re… you could tell that, you know, I’ve heard some players they love each other. Not to be corny, maybe that helped us to win this series because, you know, like the Penguins were coming. We get it. They were coming and we hung in there and maybe that’s what got us through this game.”
The team, to a man, has talked all season about the closeness of their group and the belief that they have all of the tools and answers in the room with them to find success, and they certainly proved that point in a big way last night. It was all competing for each other, just as it’s been all season long, same as it ever was.
“I mean, every single shift we’re laying it on the on the line like it’s desperation mode,” York said. “Like guys are selling out trying to block shots, help [Vladar] out as much as we can. You know, that’s just the brotherhood that we have in that locker room, and it’s been like that from Game 1 of the season, and it’s a big reason why we’re here right now. So, you know, we’re all so close and have had so many good memories this year and, you know, it just feels like we we keep stacking them and just trying to have fun with this thing.”
This isn’t to suggest that the Flyers are content to rest on their laurels here, far from it, but there is a bit of a feeling of playing with house money at work here. The Flyers were never supposed to be in this position, this place in the postseason, and while they have all of the belief in the world in their group and they’ll continue to throw everything that they have at making this a productive run, there’s a sense that anything accomplished from here on out — if you’ll forgive the sentimentality — will be a positive, because they’ve done it together.
