November 02, 2026
Kyle Ross/IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect
Travis Konecny made it back from injury, and for a night at least, the Flyers looked like a competitive hockey team again.
The Flyers got Travis Konecny and Owen Tippett back from injury, and a couple of days after the "soft" label got openly tossed out there, which brought the entire culture that the team had spent years trying to repair under a harsh microscope, they put together a solid game of hockey again – for probably their best effort all season.
Matvei Michkov kept hovering around the net to jump out to a team-leading 10 goals, Konecny scored on a heads-up bounce and skated with a spark that was badly missing, Tippett sprung Travis Sanheim across center ice for a great mini-breakaway chance, and for the first time all year, the Flyers were skating downhill and visibly running away with a game through the second period.
The Flyers beat the visiting Utah Mammoth at home Sunday night, 6-3, to snap another lifeless losing streak where anything that could go wrong would, and all without much pushback, which led captain Sean Couturier and veteran defenseman Nick Seeler to reach a breaking point in front of the media.
The immediate response hardly means that they're out of the woods now, or that all their problems are magically solved and they're going to be just fine from here, because that just isn't reality.
That franchise-worst start still may not be fully recoverable, the defense-heavy system that they've been trying to play to under Rick Tocchet still may not produce consistent results anymore without the 100-percent buy-in it had throughout last year, and then the stars just might not align for them again the same way they did last year either, now that the Eastern Conference has only gotten that much more competitive.
But for right now, and until Tuesday night when they face the Minnesota Wild right back at Xfinity Mobile Arena, they did just lay on six goals in what was easily their largest offensive outpouring of the season.
Michkov continues to look more and more like the young offensive dynamo Philadelphia has been pinning its hopes on for the past three years; Jamie Drysdale somewhat quietly turned in a three-point and plus-5 night to get back to looking like the fluid-skating, top-four defenseman he emerged into a few months ago; Cole Knuble and Oliver Bonk are the new youth that keep proving they belong; and, for a game at least, the Flyers looked like that team that clicked, rallied into the playoffs, and brought Philadelphia to believe in them again last April, after years of mediocrity and before this early-season spiral threatened to pull them straight back down to zero.
The Flyers need Matvei Michkov and other youth to keep taking hold.
It's the start of November, and there's still a steep mountain to climb that the Flyers did themselves absolutely no favors with.
But they are just a bit healthier now, and at least initially, they seemed to have taken last week's labeling of "soft" to heart.
All they can really do is take the win and go from there.
"There's obviously noise," Konecny said postgame Sunday night. "But, like, as far as our group, there's no talk about that. You know what I mean? It's just like, 'Let's get back on track, let's chip away, and see where we're at at the end,' you know?
"People can doubt us. That's fine. They did last year. We didn't know we were gonna get in last year. We just put our heads down and went to work. That's kind of our plan right now. Do our best, see where we're at by Christmas time and, you know, reevaluate then."
It's all they can do from here.
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