Through 30 games of this season, the Philadelphia Flyers have been a good hockey team. That is a statement that can be made without qualification, as the team has a 17-10-3 record and currently sits firmly in a playoff spot — in second place! — in the thought-to-be-crowded Metropolitan Division. Their points percentage and goal differential are both 10th-best in the NHL and fourth-best in the Eastern Conference. They’ve been firmly in the top half of the league by any bottom-line performance metric. They have been good.
And this has caught some people off guard. Because, y’know, the Flyers weren’t supposed to be good? They weren’t good last year, they openly announced they were rebuilding, and then they got rid of multiple high-profile players from last season without adding any significant NHL-level contributors (or so it seemed at the time, at least). They were not a team that figured to factor much into any meaningful storylines in the 2023-24 NHL season beyond what they might do at the trade deadline. And it sort of feels like it’s taken the greater NHL-watching world a while to catch on to the possibility that that scenario might not be what’s playing out.
Over the weekend, The Athletic posted its monthly check-in with its many beat and national NHL writers around the league on how they thought the season would play out from this point on. In the section asking who they thought the East playoff teams would be, just one of their voters predicted that the Flyers would make the playoffs — as many as predicted the same for the Ottawa Senators, who have the second-worst record in the East and fired their coach on Monday. (I should note here that despite this, 22.6 percent of their writers selected the Flyers as their “surprise playoff team” despite most of them evidently not predicting the Flyers to make the playoffs. I have no idea how that works.)
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