There is no denying that the Philadelphia Flyers have the worst power play in the NHL this year. Despite having some skill through their lineup, they have been able to score on just 13.2 percent of their man advantages, earning them the very bottom spot in the league for that conversion rate.
And it goes even deeper. According to MoneyPuck, only the Winnipeg Jets have been able to have fewer expected goals per hour on the power play than the Flyers this season. A whopping 4.99 expected goals per hour for a total of 31.95 on the season at 5-on-4 and during that time, just 25 goals scored. It’s not even just bad luck either — although a league-worst 9.01 shooting percentage doesn’t help either — but that whole system feels rotten at its core.
Without any other context of how they have been playing, if you have awoken from an eight-month slumber and the last thing you remember is the Flyers taking Matvei Michkov at seventh overall last June, you would assume that the Flyers have finished yet again at the bottom of their division and all eyes are on their draft lottery odds to take Macklin Celebrini first overall. Well, oops! They are not and are about to head on a postseason journey that will be incredibly interesting.
This weird combination of being a fairly decent team that could make some relative amount of noise in the playoffs is just so incredibly interesting. Could this league-worst power play be incredibly detrimental to them when they just need one goal to win a crucial playoff game? Or could penalties just not cause that much of a factor and not being able to reliably score on a quarter of your power-play chances, really not matter?
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