October 28, 2026
Eric Hartline/IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect
Rick Tocchet and the Flyers are struggling to find consistent efforts.
Sometimes a single game can capture the essence of a whole season, or at least what's there so far.
Tuesday night at Xfinity Mobile Arena, the Flyers were a lackadaisical and uncompetitive mess through the first period, until they decided to wake up and get with it through the second and third, only to royally shoot themselves in the foot in overtime with consecutive turnovers for consecutive 2-on-0 breaks – with Dan Vladar bailing out the first big time, but not able to do anything about the second when Kent Johnson and Adam Fantilli came rushing at the Philadelphia goaltender seconds later.
The Flyers lost to the visiting Columbus Blue Jackets, 4-3, after the extra frame, taking the loser's point, sure, but hardly making any upward progress in the standings from the disastrous hole they dug themselves in during the season's first two weeks.
They're 3-7-4 and are at the bottom of the Eastern Conference.
Three straight wins last week that consisted of increasingly solid efforts and encouraging signs that they were starting to settle down and figure things out are now sandwiched between a franchise-worst nine-game losing streak to start, where they couldn't do anything to help themselves, and consecutive defeats where the entire 60-minute-plus showing never warranted them winning.
And in the case of Tuesday night, they fell down 3-0 quick, somehow sprinted all the way back to tie it and force overtime, but then once they had the game right there in front of them for the taking, they folded.
The story of the 2026-27 Philadelphia Flyers so far, condensed into just a few hours.
"We were flat, no energy," said defenseman Cam York, who made his return to the lineup Tuesday night after a stint on injured reserve. "I think it took a kicking in the butt to get us going."
"We were bad," said Trevor Zegras of the first-period effort. "We weren't good. We weren't ready to go, didn't get pucks in behind them, didn't forecheck, slow in the neutral zone, two shots...just not how we play."
Except they're 14 games and just shy of a month into the season, so maybe it is.
Cam York skated 21:49 in his return to the Flyers' lineup.
"We've been chasing all year trying to play 60 minutes," head coach Rick Tocchet said. "We didn't do the game plan in the first. We decided to do it, and look at the difference. So until we get it [through] our thick heads, we gotta play a certain way. I think, second period, our recovery rate was 82 percent because we were doing the right things.
"So yeah, good comeback, and then obviously, overtime...the decision-making in overtime this year has been mind-boggling on some players. We gotta fix it quickly."
But much more pressing, they have to fix the part where they're not starting on time.
"You're still digging yourself out," Travis Sanheim said. "We dug it deep enough that we can't afford to have the starts that we did and lose a game like that where you control the play for 40 minutes, and because you don't start on time, you end up losing. It's unfortunate. It's a lesson learned. We'll move on and get ready for tomorrow."
Thing is, the Flyers are getting past time to keep the benefit of the doubt that they're adapting. At a certain point, this is just who they are.
By the time Columbus had buried them into that 3-0 hole Tuesday night, the Flyers had just two shots on goal, and we were well into a prolonged stretch where they had gone more than half of the opening period without putting another puck on net.
And it wasn't just that they weren't shooting. They couldn't get down the ice. There was little connectivity through the neutral zone, and after a while the Flyers found themselves with a lone puck handler peddling backwards to their own net with a hounding Blue Jackets checker attacking, which quickly snowballed into danger.
"We were playing so slow," Tocchet said. "Taking it back every time, we're not a team that can take the puck back. We just can't do it. Some guys think they can, but you can't.
"But when you decide to play north, same thing last year, that's our identity. So gotta keep going, keep pounding their heads."
But it's not last year anymore.
Trevor Zegras and the Flyers got yet another reality check on Tuesday night.
At Monday's practice at the Flyers Training Center in Voorhees, and then at the morning skate Tuesday at the arena, Tocchet talked to the media about the encouraging signs the team showed during the string of wins they put together last week, and how they can leave behind all the bad that the first two weeks of the season brought, calling back to how last year, for the most part, the group did well to move on and learn lessons quickly.
"It was in our DNA last year," Tocchet said Tuesday morning, acknowledging that outside of the January skid into the Olympic break, "[we] took the information and applied it to the next game."
"Yeah, I'm hoping for that," he added for puck drop later that night.
But then the game started, and the Flyers were down, then up, then out.
Afterward, Tocchet referred to it as "rollercoaster-ish," and maybe the rest of what he said was intentional, or maybe not, but it might've been damning. He openly speculated on the collective buy-in of his team.
"It's a chunk of players that have to think the same way," Tocchet said. "Not two or three guys on any given night. It needs a chunk. We have to have a chunk of players that know that when we come in, this is how the Flyers play. We can't be so rollercoaster-ish...
"So yeah, I don't know if it's one or two players. For our team, I think it's a group, a collective group of players."
And maybe that's the story of the 2026-27 Philadelphia Flyers, condensed into one running thought, and at an increasingly serious concern now that it might not get any better.
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