April 18, 2026
Charles LeClaire/Imagn Images
Trevor Zegras and the Flyers will finally begin a long-awaited playoff run against Rickard Rakell and the Penguins Saturday night in Pittsburgh.
The month and a half long rally took the Philadelphia Flyers straight into the Stanley Cup Playoffs, after almost six years away, and to the next chapter of their storied rivalry against the Pittsburgh Penguins.
The first-round postseason series begins later Saturday in Pittsburgh, with Game 1 set for an 8 p.m. ET puck drop.
It took so much for a young and developing roster to get here already, and it's pretty uncharted ground for a good chunk of it from here, but even so, no one's satisfied.
They want to take this wave as far as it can go.
"It's an awesome feeling, but it's kind of quick-lived, you know?" said veteran winger Travis Konecny, who was adamant that this Flyers team could make the playoffs from the beginning. "You get in and you're not satisfied again. You wanna keep going."
But they need to get past the notorious Sidney Crosby and the rival Pens in a best-of-seven series to do it. Here are a few keys for how they can...
As bizarre as it is to actually type after so many years, the Philadelphia Flyers are going into the series with a genuine advantage in goaltending.
Dan Vladar has been excellent as their emerging No. 1 all season, especially down the stretch to clinch, when he won five of his last six starts with a .921 save percentage, and stood tall to make all the stops in the shootout against Carolina to officially punch the Flyers' postseason ticket.
Vladar carried a .906 save percentage for the whole season through 51 starts, and more often than not, left the Flyers with a chance every night he was in the crease.
Sam Ersson has turned himself around considerably since the Olympic break, too, carrying a .912 save percentage in nine appearances since coming back after he struggled pretty mightily before the break.
An underlying key, though, is that the Flyers simplified and recommitted to a defensive style under head coach Rick Tocchet that takes away half the ice and limits opposing shots on goal to pretty large success since the break also.
They're not about to change what's been working for them now, which means the Flyers are going to stay with their game and keep leaning on Vladar heavily as they go. After all, it's carried them this far.
On the other side for the Penguins is Stuart Skinner, a historically volatile goalie, but one who helped to revitalize Pittsburgh when its GM Kyle Dubas made the trade with Edmonton for him back in December.
Skinner is carrying an underwhelming .885 save percentage through 27 starts for the Penguins, and backup Arturs Silovs behind him has been just as dicey with an .888 save percentage through 38 starts.
But what the Penguins' goaltending is going to try to hang its hat on is experience.
Skinner has gone to the last two Stanley Cup Finals with the Oilers, and Silovs isn't far removed from helping to push one of those Edmonton teams to the brink two years ago in the second round under Tocchet when both were in Vancouver.
By comparison, Ersson has never been to the playoffs, and Vladar's experience is limited to a game each with Boston and Calgary more than several years ago now.
Vladar doesn't seem to think that's really going to matter in the end, though.
"Nothing's really changing for us," Vladar said after practice in Voorhees on Thursday. "It may be a little bit of a bigger spotlight on our backs, but at the same time, you gotta play the same hockey. We just gotta remember what got us here, not changing a lot, because this is what's been working for us.
"We just gotta believe that it's gonna continue working for us."
Matvei Michkov has been on a louder and louder tear coming down the Flyers' stretch to clinch, closing out the regular season with 18 points (four goals, 14 assists) and a plus-11 rating through the last 16 games.
His skating has gotten cleaner, he's bouncing off and reading plays better, and that creativity that always projected to make him a star has shined through greater.
Now the 21-year-old winger is on the kind of stage he's been waiting for ever since he arrived to Philadelphia two summers ago from Russia, well ahead of schedule.
And he might just put on a show.
"I don't know about the excitement yet," Michkov said through interpreter Slava Kuznetsov after practice on Friday. "Tomorrow will be the first game, and we'll show up."
The Flyers can hang with anyone at even strength. Special teams has been another story, though.
And the Penguins have had almost two decades of strong power play continuity between their seemingly eternal core of Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Kris Letang, and for the past few years, Erik Karlsson, who has had a resurgent season as a puck-controlling defenseman.
Pittsburgh is coming in with a top-five power play in the NHL at a 26.1-percent success rate. The Flyers, infamously, are in the league's basement at a third-worst 15.8 percent.
The Flyers do boast some considerably strong penalty killers between captain Sean Couturier, veteran waiver pickup Luke Glendening, and hard-checking two-way centers Noah Cates and Christian Dvorak.
But if the Flyers find themselves in the penalty box and shorthanded too often, the Penguins are going to overwhelm them and sink them fast.
They have to stay on their game, and be disciplined doing it.
The Flyers' locker room has been trying to treat this next stage like just another day, which is going to be important for many guys as they step onto the playoff ice for the very first time.
This is finally it for Trevor Zegras, Jamie Drysdale, Rasmus Ristolainen, and to a large degree, Owen Tippett, who have all waited a while for this (even though Tippett did skate in a handful of playoff games for Florida in 2021), and it'll be totally new for Michkov, Cates, Denver Barkey, Alex Bump, Tyson Foerster, and the new rookie star Porter Martone.
It's huge for all of them to be playing these kinds of high-stakes games right now and understanding what they're like, but at the same time, they want to do some damage, too, and not get too caught up in the moment against a Penguins core that has been there plenty of times before.
"Whoever you are, be that guy," Tocchet said Friday of his messaging to the team before they left for Pittsburgh. "Don't change because the stakes are higher. What do they got – 1,100 games of experience? We have what? Less than 200?
"Do we have to change because of that? No. We've been playing playoff games for a month now, a lot of high-stakes games.
"But I've seen the personality of the guys. I haven't seen the team really change their personality. They're still hooting and hollering, having fun in the room before the game."
And hey, Philadelphia has seen this before. Sometimes it's better for a club to go in mostly blind and not make too much of the situation. That wave can carry you far (see the 2022 Phillies).
"I can tell some guys are gonna be nervous," Tocchet continued. "So we're gonna have to help them, I think more because of the experience. But my only message to them is 'Be who you are.'"
It's taken them this far, after all.
Let's face it here, Flyers-Penguins has been relatively dormant for quite a long time, but this is a matchup that everyone's going to be tuning in for because we all know, when both teams are good and on a crash course for one another, blood boils, tensions spill, and inevitably, fists fly.
If this series stretches on, both sides are going to remember real quick that they really don't like each other, and Crosby especially is going to get a reminder that he has no friends in Philadelphia once the series gets back to South Philly for a long-awaited Game 3 that everyone breaking out their orange and black gear again has circled on their calendars for this Wednesday.
If this turns out anything like the legendary 2012 series, we're in for a rollercoaster ride that we'll be talking about for years.
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