January 15, 2026
Timothy T. Ludwig/Imagn Images
Owen Tippett and the Flyers have been getting pushed to the outside of late.
The Flyers are on a run of bad hockey, and now with an injury they really couldn't afford.
They were a mess on Wednesday night in Buffalo. They weren't all that threatening with the puck, didn't take all that great a care of it with some ugly turnovers through center ice, and even though they kept the opposing shot count low, each one they did allow just seemed to hurt way more.
The Flyers lost to the Sabres, 5-2, for their fourth consecutive loss and their third straight in regulation. Piling on to the misfortune was that leading goaltender Dan Vladar exited after the first period with injury, leaving the rest of the game, and probably a bit beyond that now, to a struggling Sam Ersson, which Buffalo took advantage of.
Getting away from Philadelphia for a bit after those couple of miserable games against Tampa Bay offered the Flyers no reprieve.
Their problems got right on the road with them, at a tough spot in the schedule, and with no chance for a breather either, since Pittsburgh is up on Thursday as the latter half of a back-to-back.
The Flyers have done a solid job all season to keep bad habits and losing stretches from stockpiling, which up until Thursday morning, had the team playing well enough to occupy one of the Eastern Conference's playoff spots.
But this is different. They look like they're skating out of sync, the mistakes are snowballing, and so are the injuries, all while they've slid to just outside of the playoff bubble looking in.
It's not the end of the world for them – not yet at least – but they probably want to find a break somewhere, and fast.
"We have moments and we're not delivering right now," head coach Rick Tocchet said after Wednesday night's loss. "So really, that's the key. You give up 14 shots, but we're giving up four, like, unbelievable middle shots...the last couple games, it's uncharacteristic with the team right now."
A priority on sound defense paired with a significant upgrade in goaltending thanks to Vladar had been the Flyers' saving grace up until about a week or so ago.
They still don't generate a lot of shots – they haven't taken more than 23 in the four games since the 39-shot outburst against Anaheim – but the flipside of that is they don't give up many either, with an average of 20.8 shots allowed over the Flyers' last five games.
It's just the how and when that's been killing them when those shots do come.
The Lightning's veteran core of stars, led by Nikita Kucherov, jumped on them during Tampa's two-game stay in Philly, then the Sabres kept picking the puck away in the neutral zone on Wednesday night, while wheeling it around Flyers skaters who collapsed in on their net whenever they got caught in their own end. Give Buffalo's top defenseman Rasmus Dahlin his space and time to shoot from up top, he'll pick his spot and hit it. He did it twice. And drift too far down toward your own net after a while, someone eventually gets left open, like Jack Quinn was on the Sabres' third goal.
The Flyers' special teams have fallen apart of late, too.
Their power play has been notoriously bad for years, but even so, they've gone 3-for-24 on it going back to New Year's Eve, which included letting a five-minute major go unpunished against Anaheim last week, even though they walked away from that game just fine. They went 1-for-5 on the power play against Buffalo.
More damaging, however, is that their penalty kill has been getting crushed, with just a 59.1 percent success rate (13-22) over their last seven games.
Then, of course, there are the injuries.
Jamie Drysdale just made it back, but Bobby Brink is still sidelined and went on Injured Reserve earlier Thursday. Rasmus Ristolainen was announced to have a day-to-day upper-body injury keeping him out just before the Buffalo game, Tyson Foerster just won't be back for months after getting surgery, and now Vladar is down with suspect goaltending depth behind him at the Flyers' infamously cursed position.
It's just a bad stretch of hockey right now, compounded with some equally bad breaks.
"We gotta get our spark, our mojo back a little bit," forward Trevor Zegras said. "We just gotta, I guess, reboot our brains a little bit. You're gonna go through these tough stretches. That's part of it."
But the Flyers have to find a way to snap out of it, and fast.
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