You know what’s fun? When your favorite hockey team (in this case, your, my, and our Philadelphia Flyers) is winning games.
You know what’s also fun? When your favorite team wins an exciting, intense game.
But you know what’s maybe even more fun? When your favorite team just beats the everliving snot out of whoever it’s facing and coasts to an easy, non-dramatic win.
And you know who hasn’t had a ton of fun over the past year or so of watching their favorite team play hockey? Us, as Flyers fans, perhaps because we have not had many games where the Flyers just beat the everliving snot out of whoever they were facing. Y’know … like they did in Monday’s 6-1 win over the Seattle Kraken.
In the entirety of the 56-game 2020-21 season, the Philadelphia Flyers had three games in which they held at least a two-goal lead throughout the entire third period. (This is an arbitrary definition of an “easy win”, to be sure, but it feels like a decent benchmark for what can be considered one.) Two of those games were 3-0 wins on back-to-back days at the end of February against the Buffalo Sabres (this one and this one, if you’re so inclined), and the other one was a 7-2 win over the Penguins in early May with about a week left in the season.
Beyond those three, the Flyers had eight games last season that they won by more than one goal. However, in five of those games, the Flyers had to break a tie at some point in the third period. And in the other three, they were hanging on to a one-goal lead late with no more than eight minutes remaining in the game before finally pulling away, sometimes with an empty-netter and sometimes with another insurance goal.
In other words, “coasting their way to easy, dominant wins” is not a thing that last year’s Flyers found a way to do very often, particularly a) when facing teams that were not the Buffalo Sabres, and b) when compared to how often teams were coasting their way to easy, dominant wins against the Flyers themselves. (For comparison’s sake, the Flyers had 19 losses last season by more than one goal; of those 19, nine fit the definition of an “easy win” that we’ve established here for the Flyers’ opponents.)
All of which is to say that when a team — led by your former coach, I should note — rolls into the Flyers’ building and gets rolled up and flattened on the way out of it, cherish that. It hasn’t happened often recently, and it’d be real nice if we could see it happening a bit more often this season.
