Flyers hot start to the season is paramount with COVID waiting in the wings
By Joe Walls
The Philadelphia Flyers opened up their season with a two-game set against the Pittsburgh Penguins on Wednesday and Friday respectively, and walked away with four important points.
The National Hockey League, along with every other sports league in the world, is experiencing COVID-19 related complications.
Unfortunately for the Flyers, they have a disadvantage that has been brewing for years and required a little digging into the archives to get a better understanding. A fifty-six game season is nothing to pinch your berries at, but this season has the virus waiting to strike at any given moment.
Some of you may have witnessed the coronavirus effect on professional football, randomly scourging through a handful of NFL franchises and with a swift trip to the hotel bar, their seasons were sent to the infirmary.
Philadelphia Flyers
This pandemic doesn’t play favorites, this virus doesn’t have feelings, and sports franchises don’t get a hall pass like they used to.
A fifty-six game Kentucky Derby sprint of a hockey season. Pair that with the constantly hovering fear of COVID-19, and the Flyers are in a position that has been profoundly foreign to them for quite some time – winning hockey games early in the season.
The first two games of the season have been amazing. At the moment everything is looking rosy after winning both their games against the super-rival Pittsburgh Penguins.
Every team will start the season with a little extra jam trying to collect those all-important, early-season, bitcoin points.
Stockpiling wins while team rosters are at their strongest will be imperative as the possibility of an outbreak lurks in the shadows. The Flyers might be 2-0 but if history is any indicator, they have their work cut out for them.
Philadelphia’s early season struggles date all the way back to a time when headphones still had cords.
Looking back at the first ten games of every season since 2012-2013, it has been eight long years the Flyers have had eerily similar outcomes as they’ve struggled getting off the blocks.
Peter Laviolette was still the coach in 2012-2013 and the Flyers tip-toed out of the gates with a 4-6 win-loss record. The following season they started out with three wins and seven losses; the Flyers were a boat taking on water fast.
It turns out that Peter Laviolette’s so called leash was more rip cord as the Flyers became the fastest team to fire a coach in NHL history. Nine periods in and the organization had seen enough. They are a combined 26-29-5 in the six seasons from 2014-15 through 2019-20. Only one season resulted in a winning percentage over .500. That was last year when Alain Vigneault and company “silenced” the doubters with that 5-4-1 start.
There are countless reasons to believe that this year’s team is finally going to buck the trend. Let’s start with the obvious, the returns of Nolan Patrick and Oskar Lindblom filling in roster spots that were previously occupied by a box of cheerios and a loaf of day-old bread.
Patrick and Lindblom healthy, happy, and playing incredibly well have balanced out the lines for the Flyers and elevated the offense dramatically. The team that lost to the Islanders couldn’t hold water standing next to the current squad, and it was just two players that changed it all.
The Flyers have the rare and sought-after quality that is, team speed. They are not necessarily a fast team with a lot of speedsters but because of the way they are coached into their systems it appears they have another gear.
They move the puck well which often fools people into thinking they have a fast roster.
They move together as a unit instead of years past where it seemed like they moved in spite of each other. When you have it, you know you have it. The Flyers have team speed.
The last part which is often overlooked is team chemistry. Chemistry can fluctuate year to year and throughout the course of every season. Something clicked last year and guys like Kevin Hayes with team first mentalities can sometimes be the missing piece in an equation.
It is hard to gauge chemistry because team dynamics vary from franchise to franchise. Whatever it is supposed to look like, it sure seems like they have it, and have had it consistently going all the way back to the start of last year. They are not a team without faults as we saw with one Pittsburgh odd-man rush after another.
At times that team speed I was talking about blew a tire, and took a while to recover from it. But they do not have any glaring flaws and they have already started to chip away at the early season blues with two big wins against their most hated rival.
It has been a fortnight or two since I have been able to say with any confidence that the Flyers are a better hockey team than the Penguins. It would be foolish to make any assertions with a two-game sample size, but I’m already probably the frontrunner for NHL Homer of the week with the articles I’ve posted.
The Penguins still have their star power with Crosby and Malkin performing at a high level despite heading into the downslope of their careers. They have a young goaltender in Tristan Jarry who has showed he can play at a high level at times against NHL competition.
The last two games were not a particularly good example of that to put it lightly. They are well coached, despite their yearly battles with discipline. And they have Stanley-Cup pedigree. That didn’t stop the Flyers from breaking the levees off a shell-shocked Tristan Jarry and that group of mild sauce they have on defense for two decisive victories.
Outscoring a team 10 goals to 5 goals in a two-game series while being outplayed by the other team would require an extraordinary set of circumstances.