December 13, 2023
The Flyers fell in overtime to the Predators Tuesday night down in Nashville, but climbed out of a 2-0 hole to force the extra frame in the first place.
They're coming back home to Philly having won four of their last five games and having gained nine of 10 possible points out of them.
It's mid-December and the Flyers have yet to lose a game in regulation this month, all while volleying back and forth with the Islanders for second place in the Metropolitan division – both have 33 points as of Wednesday.
The openly rebuilding team is holding a playoff spot more than a third of the way through the season and has beaten some solid teams – Cup contenders, even – in the process, or at the very least, has given them a fight.
So at what point does this start becoming real? At what point do the Philadelphia Flyers actually have a legitimate shot at making the playoffs?
We might be right there.
When we last checked in on their playoff odds at the end of November, the Flyers had a 31.9 percent chance at a postseason berth according to MoneyPuck's projections. At the time, they were hovering at a hockey .500 11-10-1, but were playing a commendable and aggressive brand of hockey that produced some impressive defensive metrics and tons of offensive chances in transition.
That hasn't slowed in the couple of weeks since, but now the Flyers are 15-10-3 after beating the rival Penguins twice in a home-and-home, the upstart Coyotes, and then the perennially contending Avalanche before falling short against Nashville.
They've stayed with it, and now their chances, per MoneyPuck, have jumped substantially up to 47.9 percent with two other teams in the early hunt in Washington and Detroit coming up at home this week and with the larger hockey world beginning to take notice.
Sean Couturier is fully healthy and back to being a two-way force at the top of the lineup, Travis Sanheim has continued to bounce back in a huge way on the blue line, Travis Konecny is scoring at an All-Star rate, Carter Hart gives them a chance every time he's in goal, and younger pieces like Joel Farabee, Tyson Foerster, and Cam York are gradually finding themselves as pros and increasingly taking on more.
Their performance continues to reflect well in the numbers too. The Flyers' penalty kill is a top-five unit in the league with a success rate of 86.7 percent on top of scoring the season's second-most shorthanded goals with seven. The team as a whole has given up the eighth-fewest goals per game on average (2.71) and its expected goals percentage stands as the fourth-highest in the league at 53.54 percent – again, per MoneyPuck. And that's even above high-powered offensive teams like the Devils, Penguins, Avalanche, and defending champion Golden Knights.
There's a lot going for the Flyers right now, and yeah, it all runs counterintuitive to the conventional thinking of a rebuild, sure.
And maybe it will all balance out and catch up to them at some point like many were expecting going into the season. But then again, a couple more big wins and a couple more weeks of solid play in a noticeably vulnerable Metro division – Pittsburgh's struggling to make it work with Crosby, Malkin, and Karlsson, and the Devils and Hurricanes have been plagued by goaltending issues – and just like that, the Flyers could be very much alive in this race, maybe even dictating it.
"We're not satisfied," Couturier said postgame Tuesday night in Nashville. "We let a point go here at the end, but overall a lot of positives and the way we came back tonight down two, stuck with it, found a way to get a big point, that's huge, for sure."
And the more those positives pile up, the more the Flyers stand a legitimate shot.
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