December 04, 2025
Eric Hartline/Imagn Images
Sam Ersson (33), Owen Tippett (74), and the Flyers rallied to another win Wednesday night over the Sabres.
In the locker room, after both the morning skate on Wednesday and then the 5-2 win over Buffalo later that night, the chatter going around was about how the Flyers are different.
They got rocked by Pittsburgh 5-1 a couple of nights prior, but no one seemed shaken by it.
Part of it was they had just won their last three games before, all on the road, and all on a four-games-in-six-days stretch coming home, which can catch up to any NHL team no matter the talent.
But the other part was the habits and trends they'd been showing before this week, too.
Yeah, they lose, sometimes badly. But whereas the Flyers of the past couple of years would snowball a rough game into a rougher losing streak, or crumble under an injury like to Tyson Foerster, this season's team, so far, hasn't let the bad linger. They course correct fast.
The Flyers may stumble, but they get right back up and keep going.
Wednesday night's bounce-back thrashing of the visiting Sabres was a continued show of that.
The Flyers haven't lost consecutive games in regulation since the back-to-back against Toronto and Calgary from Nov. 1-2, and across regulation, overtime, and the shootout, have yet to lose any more than two straight games all year, which has kept them up within the early Eastern Conference playoff picture.
They're resilient still, having had to climb out of yet another 1-0 hole on Wednesday night. But just as important to the grander scope of the team's rebuild, their ability to prevent the losses from piling up in bunches in the early going is an encouraging sign that they're learning, they're growing. They're getting better.
"I think that's kind of the step this team needed," Noah Cates, the center who has been here from the beginning of the Flyers' whole process, said Wednesday morning. "We're not super young anymore. Guys like me, [Owen Tippett], and whoever else with the kind of young core that's been here for 3-4 years now, we're not the 22-23-24-year-old guys now. I'm turning 27, so it's gotta be that step that has to be there in our game, the maturity."
The adaptability, too.
In light of losing Foerster, who was leading the team in scoring before his upper-body injury set him down for the next 2-3 months, head coach Rick Tocchet made corresponding changes to the lineup, with the ask of his skaters to find "five-percent better" within themselves.
He stacked the top power play unit with all his best skill players (Trevor Zegras, Matvei Michkov, Travis Konecny, and Tippett, with defenseman Travis Sanheim as the point man), reunited Cates with winger Bobby Brink, and bumped the skilled-but-still-raw forward Nikita Grebenkin up to their line as a chance to finally spark some offense with more minutes.
Those decisions were quickly rewarded with the three first-period goals in 59 seconds that propelled the Flyers back into the win column.
Konecny got the first, Zegras got the second – both on the newly stacked power play – then Brink got the third on a sequence sparked by a Grebenkin keep at the offensive blue line to keep play onside and heading right back toward the Buffalo net.
Tippett and Cates piled on in the second, the Sabres rapidly lost their composure, and a home Philly crowd that's still waiting for the true moment where it knows to fully buy into the team and fill out Xfinity Mobile Arena in full again, still met the energy it was seeing on the ice and stood behind the Flyers.
Yeah, they may stumble, they may get blown out once in a while, but this season's Flyers, they've been bouncing back, they've been answering. They get right back up.
They're learning. They're growing. They're getting better.
"I think that's just showing our maturity as we're growing," Konecny, as one of the key longstanding veterans, said postgame. "I think that we work really hard, practicing and trying to keep our momentum going. You practice hard, you play hard. Those kinds of things translate."
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