With last night’s loss to the Islanders — which everyone was definitely solely focused on, nothing else notable happening last night — that brought to a close a stretch of game which saw the Flyers see divisional opponents eight times across nine games. As this gauntlet was kicking off, we took a look at this stretch, what the matchups were and what the implications of big success — or a major stumble — through this stretch would be.
We sort of joked that the Flyers, and their propensity for somehow being middling in just about everything they do, were most likely to fail to make a conclusive statement with this stretch by neither losing out and allowing them to commit to any tanking efforts nor winning big to make marked progress in the tight divisional standings. And, in short, this is exactly what they did.
In those eight divisional games, the Flyers came away with three wins, four regulation losses, and one shootout loss, and they capped things off on something of a state note — getting shut out by the Islanders last night and just overall looking like they’d run out of gas. As a result and as it stands, the Flyers are sitting sixth in the Metro with 52 points — still technically within striking distance of a playoff spot, as they’re just five points back on the Blue Jackets (though there are also five more teams between them and Columbus) but also even closer to the true basement of the division, just two points up on the Penguins.
Now, the door is still open for the Flyers to make some progress in the divisional race, particularly to create some separation from the Penguins and the Metro basement, as they have three games against them this month. But it still remains that they had an opportunity to make some real noise through this stretch, and while we can certainly acknowledge the challenges that this tightly packed schedule ahead of the 4 Nations break brought, they still failed to rise to the occasion and make the positive progress that they were surely hoping to. And it’s not just the overall results here, it’s the process that underlies it — that is, too often the team still struggled to keep up their energy and their attention to detail, and couldn’t keep rolling any momentum they were gesturing towards building.
In that regard, it might not be the worst time to have a shake-up type of trade come down. Now, this isn’t to suggest that this was some kind of panic trade, an overreaction to another just sort of middling stretch, just that things are lining up nicely here. This isn’t a perfect or complete fix, but perhaps the combination of a jolt to the players still on the roster and the injection of a pair of new players surely coming in motivated to make an impression will help to raise the tide.
There’s a lot of season left, and even if the Flyers aren’t aiming to make a hard run at the playoffs this year, there’s still a lot of work left to do to repair their process and figure out how to play complete games with some level of consistency. The Flyers are still tinkering here, but this stretch has been a very clear reminder of all that they still have to polish and figure out.
