It’s been 84 years since the Philadelphia Flyers made the playoffs. Wait, no. It’s been six years, but it sure as hell feels like much longer than that. Will the team’s playoff drought end in the next few days?
The Flyers play the Carolina Hurricanes, one of the top three teams in the league, tonight. If recent history is any indication, they stand little chance of punching their ticket tonight. Philly is 0-4-4 in their last eight games against the Hurricanes. However, the series has been close this season, with the Flyers having secured a point in each game.
An overtime loss to Carolina would give them one of the two points they need to clinch a postseason berth. They could catch a break, though. ‘Canes coach Rod Brind’Amour is looking beyond this game and resting some of his top players. Sebastian Aho, Jordan Staal, Andrei Svechnikov, Seth Jarvis, Jaccob Slavin, and Shayne Gostisbehere are all scratches tonight. History be damned, they could very well pull out a W tonight.
To win: perchance to dream.
Ay, there’s the rub; Flyers fans are tired of dreaming. A long succession of poor leadership, terrible decisions, disappointing prospects, underperforming players, and salary cap kerfuffles have all conditioned us to expect failure. To that end, no sane fan would have believed you just two months ago that the team would be flirting with a 98-point season and suddenly be one of the hottest teams in the NHL.
That being said, the Flyers are nothing if not unpredictable.
General Manager Daniel Briere was clear about his intentions: the team is being built for the long term, but winning now is not out of the question. That seemed like little more than naive optimism throughout most of the season. One could believe he was just placating fans to keep filling seats, had he not backed up his words.
Much like the Spanish Inquisition, nobody expected the Christian Dvorak extension. Nor did anyone anticipate Rasmus Ristolainen would remain on the team beyond the trade deadline. Few understood why 30-year-old Christian Dvorak would be handed a five-year contract extension. Those moves were questionable at the time, but now appear to be quite shrewd.
Whatever momentum the team may have had in its march to the postseason took hit after hit throughout the season. Matvei Michkov’s slow start and poor conditioning was a huge setback in his development. Tyson Foerster’s injury was supposed to knock him out for the season. Samuel Ersson couldn’t keep the puck out of the net. Dan Vladar went down to injury. Ristolainen couldn’t stay healthy. Murphy’s Law is a cruel mistress.
So, how the hell did we end up here, on the verge of going to the playoffs? The answer is threefold: Buy-in to head coach Rick Tocchet’s system, chemistry, and luck. We will explore each of these factors in other articles but, suffice to say, these intangibles often separate the wheat from the chaff.
This is what the team had in 2010 when they came within a couple games of securing their first Stanley Cup victory in three-and-a-half decades. They believed in then-coach Peter Laviolette and they believed in each other. A little luck came in the way of a shootout victory against the New York Rangers in the final game of the season to clinch a playoff spot.
All of this made the team loose and the players happy. When you beat the odds just to get there, you have no reason to believe you won’t stop winning. So, that’s what they did; they kept believing. Even when they were facing elimination after going down 0-3 to the Bruins in the Eastern Conference Semifinals, they didn’t give up. Against all odds, they came back to tie the series and then come back after being down 0-3 in game seven to move on to the Conference Finals.
Sixteen years later, they find themselves in a similar situation. Can they repeat the results? Honestly, there’s no reason to believe they can’t.
