After that late-season win streak that all but pulverized their chances of a top-five draft pick in the 2023 entry draft, the Flyers have gotten back to their losing ways and can make it a fourth in a row tonight in St. Louis. The Flyers were officially eliminated from the playoffs with their loss to the Buffalo Sabres on Friday; the Blues immediately followed suit and punched their ticket to the draft lottery with a loss to the Bruins on Sunday.
It’s the first time the Blues have missed the playoffs since the 2017-18 season and it’s a disappointing outcome for a team that has been a competitor for much of the last decade, including their Cup win in 2019. The Blues came into the season with the intentions of contending, but have had to part ways with a lot of key pieces, have sustained some injuries, and have receiving some pretty mediocre goaltending from Jordan Binnington and back-up Thomas Greiss.
Conversely, the Flyers were not expected to compete this year by anybody except for the people who were in charge of the team. They’ve largely performed as expected—towards the bottom of the league—and have begun giving some ice time to guys who hope to factor into future lineups. It’s been two different journey’s to the same location for these two teams.
We can expect Carter Hart in net for the Flyers, Jordan Binnington in net for the Blues, and John Tortorella in the press box for the fourth game in a row. Puck drop is at 8 p.m. because St. Louis is in a different time zone than Philadelphia.
Players to watch
Ronnie Attard
Attard is rejoining the Flyers at the NHL level for the first time this season, following his 15-game NHL debut at the tail end of last season. With help from his booming point shot, Attard has lead Phantoms defensemen in scoring this season with 11 goals and 30 points.
Jordan Kyrou
Kyrou broke out big time last season for the 49-win Blues, tallying 27 goals and 48 assists for a career-high 75 points. Kyrou was just one piece of the Blues’ offensive talent last year, though; this year, at 71 points, he’s the scoring leader by a good margin. He’s upped his goal total to 36, including 5 in his last 5 games.
Nic Deslauriers
Deslauriers is sitting at 12 points—just 3 off his career high of 15! With a goal in the loss to the Penguins, he’s now considered hot by his standards and is officially on watch. There’s six games left. Can he do it?
Ivan Provorov
Provorov has had a largely mediocre season on the ice—he currently has a career-low 24 points and a negative CF% Relative to his icemates—and a flat out bad one off the ice—his own dog unfollowed him on Instagram. We’re keeping on eye on him not so much for the former as the latter, as tonight is Pride Night in St. Louis, providing Flyers Twitter’s favorite homophobe with a prime opportunity to show his ass all over again. In fact, the Blues announced yesterday that the players would be forgoing wearing Pride-themed warm-up jerseys, a decision that has rippled through the league since Provorov himself stood up for the anti-rainbow hockey jersey clause in his own religion.
Projected Lineups
Philadelphia Flyers
Joel Farabee–Morgan Frost–Owen Tippett
Scott Laughton–Noah Cates–Travis Konecny
James van Riemsdyk–Kevin Hayes–Brendan Lemieux
Nic Deslauriers–Tanner Laczynski–Kieffer Bellows
Ivan Provorov–Cam York
Travis Sanheim–Justin Braun
Nick Seeler–Tony DeAngelo
Carter Hart
(Samuel Ersson)
St. Louis Blues
Brandon Saad—Brayden Schenn—Jakub Vrana
Sammy Blais—Kasperi Kapanen—Jordan Kyrou
Jake Neighbours—Logan Brown—Josh Leivo
Alexei Toropchenko—Nathan Walker—Tyler Pitlick
Nick Leddy—Colton Parayko
Torey Krug—Justin Faulk
Calle Rosen—Matt Kessel
Jordan Binnington
(Thomas Greiss)
Gameday Tunes
This one might be blasphemous coming from the Flyers side of things and not the Blues side, but it comes with a decent anecdote. At my wedding, I put a little section on the program that said to “text song requests” for the ceremony to this number. But the number was simply one of my friends who I didn’t tell. So he was getting texts all night with song titles, including so many from my mother and her five sisters for Laura Branigan’s 1982 disco cover of “Gloria” that he felt compelled to actually go and request the song from the DJ. And then later that year the Blues adopted it as their anthem on the way to a cup win.
