What the Flyers’ offense can learn from Game 1

No matter what the sport, the postseason looks different from its regular season counterpart. The stakes being higher, the methodology and ideas at play reflect the additional weight of shorter windows. A best of seven series does not grant time for long run sample sizes to even out.

In baseball, you watch batters aggressively work counts, tire out starters and get to the bullpen faster and exploit weaker middle relievers. In football, you watch teams lean heavily on the running game to keep the clock moving and controlling the flow of the game.

In hockey, there isn’t a tried and true “bread and butter,” conceptually the way the other sports do. If anything, hockey’s free flowing state lends itself heavily to intuitiveness. Every team has structures and systems, but a lot of the decisions in a given play (shot/pass/skate) are incumbent upon what the individual puck carrier is seeing in front of them.

For the Philadelphia Flyers, going into Saturday night’s game against the Pittsburgh Penguins as modest underdogs, there was always going to be a question as to what playoff Flyers’ hockey would look like. Rick Tocchet’s emphasis on control of high danger offense in conjunction with good situational defense worked wonders down the stretch.

However, for that style to work in the long run, it requires the utmost discipline to work. It’s wholly incumbent upon defensemen holding their ground, corralling attacking players to the outside, forwards not flying the zone early and then, most importantly, when the opportunities come off the counter attack, pouncing.

The 10,000 Foot View

Under the hood, from a metrics standpoint, the Penguins had a clear cut advantage. While not being a strong defensive team, the Penguins did a great job of out scoring their defensive problems. In 2025-26, Pittsburgh scored the third most goals of any team in the NHL while conceding the ninth most.

But, funny enough, in game one, the Flyers were the team keeping the Penguins on their heels. Philadelphia was credited with 47 scoring chances to Pittsburgh’s 42. While those numbers seem pretty close, it’s also worth pointing out that the only period in which the Penguins had more shots on goal was the third.

With the Flyers nursing a 2-1 lead for a good chunk of the third period, the Penguins had a natural late game push. This in of itself only enhances what makes the Flyers a strong defensive team.

The desperation a team feels to score a goal late against a defense-first team is comparable to struggling against quicksand or swimming against a riptide. The harder one tries to go against the force, the faster they get tired and the more desperate they get.

The added wrinkle for the Flyers is a better transition game. While defense and offense are two separate game states, one is inherently upstream of the other. It might not sound ideal, but the blueprint for this particular iteration of the Flyers, when it comes to offense, is in the same vein as the 2020 and 2021 Barry Trotz Islander teams.

Without bona fide superstars up front, the Flyers need to play to their strengths. Chief amongst them since the Olympic break is a cleaner transition game which comes from better defensive zone breakouts.

Putting it into practice

The Porter Martone goal Saturday night is a textbook example of the situational offense the Flyers will lean on in the postseason. The sequence starts back in the Flyers’ end as defenseman Rasmus Ristolainen eats forecheck pressure and a hit from Penguins’ forward Connor Dewar.

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Ristolainen eats the hit, and gets the puck up ice to a streaking Travis Konecny. Getting that puck up ice, Ristolainen has taken three Penguins out of the play, all of them trailing the puck. When a team is pushing late in the way Pittsburgh was, they won’t be as attune defensively to the counter attack.

With the puck in tow, Konecny leaves a drop pass for Martone. Konecny, now out of the play, goes for a change, but does pull a Penguin defender to him. This both allows Martone to enter the zone with speed and has the makings of a 2-on-1. The closest defender to Martone is Penguin forward Noel Acciari who’s been skating at full speed on the back check to get back into the play.

The 2-on-1 is negated by the hard back check, Acciari, a forward, ends up in front of Martone and back skating. As a forward skating backwards, Acciari is at an extreme disadvantage against Martone who slams on the breaks and buttonhooks back at the top of the circle where he rockets home the Flyers’ 3rd goal and ultimately what proved to be the game winner.

While the Flyers’ won the underlying numbers battle in game one with an edge in expected goals and scoring chances, the principles at large are the same. The Penguins will undoubtedly adjust, in particular in their own breakouts to get to offense more quickly.

But, with those concerted, sustained pushes in the offensive zone for the Penguins, the Flyers will have opportunities off of the counter attack. Those rush chances will likely be their life’s blood in the postseason because they’re a natural byproduct of the team’s defensive style to absorb low danger offense.

Talking Points