April 07, 2026
Kyle Ross/Imagn Images
Owen Tippett, Dan Vladar, and the Flyers are looking to finally break through.
This is a different Flyers team trying to sprint to the finish line with a playoff spot in hand.
This is a group that knows pain and heartbreak, to various degrees, and at this point, a thing or two about patience.
It's a group that's failed, too, countless times. Sometimes, oftentimes, they couldn't get a save, or a shot, or they couldn't defend, or they'd have a messy combination of all three – and that's before you even get to the power play.
Sometimes, it was a crapshoot of whether they could protect a lead, or even get one to begin with. And for many watching, it sometimes pushed you to the point of doubting whether general manager Danny Brière's repeatedly stated long-term plan was even working.
And yet the Philadelphia Flyers are here now, through everything – holding a playoff spot, with full control over their ability to keep it, through a post-Winter Olympic tear that rivals only the postseason-secured Buffalo Sabres for the best in the NHL since.
They beat the Boston Bruins, 2-1, in overtime on Sunday, with star rookie Porter Martone's first career goal to the eruption of a home Xfinity Mobile Arena crowd, and a swath of Philly faithfuls at large, who showed up ready to believe in them again.
And before that, they shut down the New York Islanders, who are right there in the race with them on the road Friday in Elmont, holding the Isles to just two shots after New York rolled the dice on pulling their goalie with more than seven minutes still to play.
Those aren't games that the Flyers necessarily knew how to win before, or that you had faith that they would.
But now? They're figuring it out. They're playing some of their best hockey in years, and whether they do end up making the playoffs or not, they're showing Philadelphia that they're learning, that they're ready to reach after more.
The Flyers have grown up, and now they're in a sprint to reach that next step into the postseason, starting later Tuesday night against the Devils up in Newark.
They can do this.
"There was a quote [Rick Tocchet] said the other day about 'There's no reason to be nervous because we're prepared,' and I think that's the good thing that's in this locker room right now," veteran winger Travis Konecny said. "We have confidence in our preparation, how we go about business, and it's just about executing on the ice.
"We're confident that we're gonna get it done. It's just a matter of doing it."
Travis Konecny, Sean Couturier, and Travis Sanheim are the three remaining Flyers who have skated in a playoff game in Philadelphia.
Konecny is one of the very few active Flyers still around who know what it's like to play postseason hockey in Philadelphia.
The last time the Flyers made the playoffs was in 2020, but that was in the isolation of the Toronto COVID bubble.
The last time they made the playoffs and played in a packed Xfinity Mobile Arena (formerly Wells Fargo Center) was in 2018, when former captain Claude Giroux's Hart Trophy campaign carried them to a first-round series against the rival Pittsburgh Penguins, which they eventually lost in six games.
Konecny was on that 2018 team in just his second season. He was 20 years old. Travis Sanheim, their top defenseman now, he was a rookie at just 21. And current captain Sean Couturier, he was 25, had just broken out as a 30-goal scorer, and had a building reputation as one of the best defensive centers in the NHL.
A lot has happened since.
An era came, went, and crumbled, which eventually led the organization into accepting a slow and steady rebuild with Brière at the front-office helm. Ups, downs, and of course, pain followed over the next several years, along with the unknown. Old names and even younger ones with value were shipped out to stock back up, and the Flyers gradually started to get younger on the whole with the prospect pipeline beginning to stack up, but with that came inexperience.
Trevor Zegras is among the many Flyers looking to make the playoffs for the first time in their careers.
Kyle Ross/Imagn Images
Sure, Couturier, Konecny, and Sanheim knew what the playoffs took, but that wasn't a world Owen Tippett knew outside of a COVID-impacted one-off with the Florida Panthers in 2021, and it's completely foreign territory to Rasmus Ristolainen, who's never gone to the playoffs through a ton of dark years in Buffalo and onto Philadelphia.
The playoffs are a total unknown to Jamie Drysdale and Trevor Zegras, too, who've only known early offseasons in their NHL careers going back to Anaheim, and that's not even to mention the Flyers' emerging homegrown talent – Tyson Foerster, Matvei Michkov, Alex Bump, Porter Martone now, and on down – to which a lot about the league is still new.
The closest any of them came to it, provided they were around for it then, was two years ago, when to many's surprise, the Flyers were managing to outwork teams to hold on to a playoff spot for the majority of the season, when the consensus otherwise expected them to be in the NHL's basement.
But they burnt out down the stretch and missed out, then fell back to earth the following season. A lot of guys then either ran out of gas or just didn't know how to take that next step.
This time, though, feels different, Couturier said.
The Flyers are still a pretty young team overall, with rookies like Bump, Martone, and Denver Barkey still having just recently arrived, but they are more talented than they were. And since coming back from the Winter Olympic break, they're playing easily the best hockey of this still-developing era, with enough guys around to remember how they fell apart at the finish line just a couple of years ago.
"We believe in our group," Couturier explained. "It's all about, I think, getting on a rhythm at the right time, and it seems to be a good time right now to get into a winning situation."
Along with figuring out how to survive within it.
Because now the Flyers are winning those games they couldn't before. They're holding on, and they're getting better and better at closing out, with a willingness to keep learning on the fly, and quickly, too, for wherever it might take them with the five games they have left over this next week.
They've grown up, and now the playoffs are sitting right there for them to take.
They can do this.
"There's a lot of work to go," said Zegras, who is looking to be there for the first time. "But to kind of be in the mix this late in the season, it's exciting.
"Usually by this time, you're planning golf trips and whatnot, so it's definitely really cool to be playing these meaningful games."
And to just keep those plans on hold for a bit.
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