Will the real Philadelphia Flyers please stand up?
The Flyers subpar start to the season has some fans questioning the team's legitimacy as contenders.
Hello friends!
It’s been a rocky few weeks to the start of the 2020-21 NHL season if you’re a Flyers fan. Between injuries to key players, two blowout losses, and wins that didn’t feel satisfying, it’s hard not to feel down on this Flyers team two weeks into the shortened season. Is this panic justified? Or are the Flyers better than their early-season numbers have shown? Let’s dive in!
(Photo by Steve Babineau/NHLI via Getty Images)
For some time now, the Philadelphia Flyers have been a Jekyll and Hyde team. Capable of looking completely dominant against an opponent one night, to being unable to get shots on net the next, the Flyers coined the chaos-bringing fan nickname “Flyera” for a reason.
That up-and-down tendency was a big reason the Flyers remained aggressively middle-of-the-pack in the NHL for most of the 2010s. That was, until, the 2019-20 season saw the Flyers finish second in the Metropolitan Division at the time of the pause, a mere two points from overtaking the Washington Capitals for that top spot. There was real hope last season that the Flyers had finally jumped into the top tier with other Stanley Cup contenders for the first time in nearly a decade. However, things came quickly crashing down in the playoffs, as despite winning a playoff series against the Montreal Canadiens, the team did not look at all like the one that went 14-4-1 in their last few months of play.
Much can also be said about the 2020-21 Flyers, who came into the season with an incredibly deep forward group and overall were given high expectations by fans and media alike. And for good reason! This Flyers team, when healthy, is incredibly deep at forward on paper. When put into practice, however, the results have been subpar, as while the team sits at third place in the East Division with a 3-2-1 record, nothing about the team as it stands looks right.
Injuries have certainly taken its toll on this team. A rib injury to last year’s Selke winner Sean Couturier has cut deep into the beating heart of the Flyers system, with his return set for at least another week away. The next-man-up mentality resulted in former 27th overall pick Morgan Frost getting a legitimate shot at cracking the lineup, but the 21-year-old was injured as well in his first game with the team this season.
The defense has also been hit hard by injury, as top-four defenseman Phil Myers is week-to-week with a fractured rib, gutting an already thin position to the bone.
While the injuries certainly haven’t helped, it’s not the only problem this Flyers team is facing. It was well-known coming into the season that the team’s weakness is its defense. Even though Ivan Provorov, Travis Sanheim, and Myers make up a very solid top-three, the drop off in talent after them is quite large. On their own, Justin Braun, Robert Hagg, and Erik Gustafsson are serviceable as a team’s sixth or seventh defenseman, but when making up the bottom of a team’s defensive group, problems are sure to arise.
And problems there are. Through six games this season, the Flyers have the league’s ninth-worst GA/60 at 2.68 and are the NHL’s worst CF% team at five-on-five, which sits below the Ottawa Senators and the Detroit Red Wings at a miserable 42.37 percent, according to Evolving-Hockey. As it stands now through the team’s first six games, the Flyers are having trouble possessing the puck and keeping it out of the net. Part of that falls on the shoulders of goaltender Carter Hart — who has an uncharacteristic .880 save percentage in five games played this season — but given his pedigree, he is likely the least of this team’s issues.
Even the Flyers forward depth, which was considered a strength of this team, has legitimate questions surrounding it now. While the Flyers sit sixth in the NHL in goals for this season (20), the team’s expected goals percentage is third-worst in the league, according to Evolving-Hockey. So far, it seems that the Flyers have benefited from poor goaltending from Pittsburgh, where they scored 11 of their 20 total goals in their first two wins of the year. Since then, they have scored just nine goals in four games, resulting in a 1-3-0 record.
Overall, it hasn’t been a great few weeks of Flyers hockey, and the team knows it.
It’s hard not to feel down about this Flyers team at the moment. The defense, which we knew would be a weakness, has played as poorly as possible. The offense, which seemed to be this team’s strength, has legitimate questions surrounding it as to whether or not we overrated its potency. And Hart, who has been the team’s backbone for the last few seasons, hasn’t been able to stop the bleeding thanks to his rough start to the season.
There’s reason to believe this Flyers team will bounce back. After all, six games into a shortened 56-game schedule is still early goings. We’ve seen this core play extraordinary hockey before under head coach Alain Vigneault’s tenure. Back when the Flyers posted their 14-4-1 record to end the 2019-20 season, the team had a league-best 3.31 GF/60 at five-on-five with a GA/60 that was allowing the fourth-fewest goals in the league, according to Evolving-Hockey.
While it’s not fair to expect the Flyers to return to that same level of high-impact play immediately, I also don’t think this team is a fraud nor do I think that their stretch of play last season was a mirage either. Under Vigneault last season, the Flyers ended the year seventh overall in GF/60 (2.77) and 11th in CF% (51.06) at five-on-five after starting the season with a 2-3-1 record. The early-going signs for the Flyers so far this season — numbers-wise and via the eye test — are troubling no doubt, and the team has to be better, but I wouldn’t count them out as the “same old Flyers” just yet.
There are signs of life from this team, even if the opening weeks of the season haven’t been fun to watch. Jakub Voracek and James van Riemsdyk have gotten going early this season as two of the team’s top five points producers. Nolan Patrick and Oskar Lindblom look good — and in Patrick’s case, great — after being absent from the Flyers regular season lineup for over a year. And while Hart has looked shaky at times this season, Brian Elliott has stepped up big time in his limited minutes as the backup, with a key 40-save shutout against Buffalo in his first start.
It’s clear that as a stabilizing presence, the loss of Matt Niskanen to retirement hurts a lot more than expected and the defense is no doubt worse off for it. Outside of hoping for Shayne Gostisbehere’s return to form once he reenters the lineup and shuffling around the pairings with other defensemen such as Egor Zamula and Mark Friedman, there’s no help coming for this defense in terms of a trade right now given the market. As the trade deadline approaches, however, general manager Chuck Fletcher will likely be — and should be — on the lookout for a top-four defenseman to provide much-needed relief.
These next few weeks will be a major litmus test for this Flyers team. If they can right the ship and return to form in some way — the defense stabilizing, Hart getting his legs back under him, the offense getting on the same page — it would go a long way to quelling fan’s fears that last year’s showings were a mirage. If they don’t, and this stretch of poor play continues through February, the sentiment that the Flyers are just pretenders will remain.
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