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It’s still cool to win sometimes

Don’t look now folks, but the Philadelphia Flyers have won six of their last seven.

After such a tumultuous end to 2022, it almost seemed like this team was banished. If the opposing team was not in the bottom five of the standings, they couldn’t win. It almost made sense at a point — they tried harder than other bad teams so they could beat them, but against anyone with more talent they were just overwhelmed.

The last couple of weeks has demonstrated, among other things, that the Flyers can definitely still beat good teams on the right night. A recent victory over a quality Washington team, who had just added Tom Wilson and Nicklas Backstrom back to their lineup, showed just that. That isn’t to say that the team is good enough. It’s not. There are still massive shortcomings in every corner of the roster, but there’s not much that can be done about that in mid-season. Maybe there could be some deadline deals, but even those types of hypothetical trades would only take talent off of the team in return for future assets. What you see is what you get, and you might as well enjoy it a little while it lasts.

Honestly, in most situations, going on a heater midway through the season wouldn’t be a cause for concern. The tone of this article should be way more excited realistically, but it’s quite obvious that this is a flash in a pan, and the potential of a top three pick in the upcoming 2023 NHL Draft makes it so losing would help the future way more than winning now would.

However, seeing a team night in and night out giving their all is commendable. And whether or not you agree with John Tortorella taking away the iPads on the bench or scratching his top scorer, he has gotten the team to buy in up until this point, despite their personnel deficiencies. That is something that was not always the case at the tail end of Alain Vigneault’s tenure, and is to be appreciated even if the team isn’t great. Eventually this organization will try to be successful again, and holding everyone in the locker room accountable is going to have to be apart of that process.

This little hot streak isn’t going to mean much in the grand scheme, but winning in the NHL is never a negative. There can always be positives pulled from your team playing well, even if it may damage the carefully crafted tank job that the Flyers have been committing to, whether they wanted to or not. But Travis Konecny scoring 12 goals in 10 games, Samuel Ersson getting his first shutout; these are players who should either have a role to play on future, hopefully better, teams, or will be valuable trade pieces down the line.

It is still fun to see those players succeed, and it gives you hope that there may actually be some valuable pieces for the future already on the team. But don’t actually expect these Flyers to make anymore noise beyond some decent stretches against bad teams with no structure, like the obviously inept Coyotes, and surprisingly abysmal Ducks, both who they’ve played recently.

Or this could be outdated in a week and there could be another 10 game losing streak around the corner. That’s the fun of it!

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