April 18, 2024
Eric Hartline/USA Today Sports
The grind of the season took a heavy toll on Travis Sanheim and the Flyers.
Locker cleanout days always bring two things: The somber quiet of a season's end and the revelation of how banged up a team actually was through all of it.
Wednesday for the Flyers was no different, especially when it came to their back end.
Travis Sanheim admitted he was hurting for a bit there during the last stretch when he met with the media over at the team's training center in Voorhees, and Cam York, Jamie Drysdale, and Nick Seeler all verified the same for themselves, though clips of the respective plays and time missed already proved as much.
Add that to Rasmus Ristolainen quietly going out for the rest of the year with an upper-body injury that was only just revealed Thursday to have been a ruptured tricep, losing Sean Walker at the trade deadline in a future-minded move that knowingly made the team of here and now worse, and trying to compensate for that and being stretched so thin with increasingly-limited veterans in Marc Staal and Erik Johnson plus call-ups with limited NHL experience in Ronnie Attard and Adam Ginning.
Yeah, that was a lot of lost time, manpower, and skill to make up for, that the Flyers, try as they might, couldn't fully cover in the end as they missed out on the playoffs with Tuesday night's 2-1 loss to the Capitals in the regular season finale.
And it's a bitter feeling, the players agreed, but you hardly heard any of them complaining about it either.
"It's tough to sit here and say 'Yeah, we were banged up," Seeler said. "Everyone's banged up. It's something that you have to work through mentally and just be able to push through those physical ailments or whatever you're going through as best you can. Go out there and do your job."
Seeler started the season paired with Walker and together they broke out into one of most dependable defensive groupings in the league. It earned the 30-year old Seeler, for the first time in his career, security in the NHL with a four-year contract, but Walker attention from across the league approaching the deadline and ultimately the shot at a Cup run with Colorado since the Avalanche were offering the Flyers a 2025 first-rounder.
But Seeler made his impact with a committed, hard-checking style that sold out on shot-blocking – he blocked 205 shots for the season, which was the fifth-most in the league – but on March 4 against the Blues, he finally stepped in front of one that hit him the wrong way and kept him sidelined until March 30.
Drysdale took a big open-ice hit in the February 25 loss to the Penguins and left it clutching a left shoulder that he already had issues with going back to Anaheim before the Cutter Gauthier trade. It took him until the April 1 overtime loss to the Islanders, amid what became the Flyers' eight-game spiral to come back.
And even then, he tried to tread carefully at cleanout day, but ultimately hinted that he was never fully healthy through the entire season across Anaheim and Philadelphia.
"I mean, yeah," Drysdale said. "I mean, no excuses, but everyone deals with stuff. So yeah, just gonna work this offseason to try and make sure that it doesn't happen again."
As to whether that meant any surgeries or procedures in the summer: "Potentially," Drysdale said after a pause.
Then there was Sanheim and York, who each only ate up heavier and heavier minutes as the back half of the season went on and the blueline depth got more and more depleted.
Sanheim, who missed all but one game but touched on issues that limited his skating for a while deep into the schedule, skated an average of 24:02 a night from March 1 onward.
"Obviously, playing a lot, a little banged up as well, and battling through some injuries," Sanheim said at season's end. "A lot at stake, and in saying that, I think me and [York] fully wanted that. We wanted to be carrying the load. We wanted to be a big part of it, and I think for the most part, me and Yorkie played pretty well.
"It's just obviously disappointing with the outcomes, but I'm happy with how me and him played down the stretch."
York, he got crushed along the boards in the third period of February 15's 4-3 OT loss in Toronto and exited right after. He suffered a grade 2 AC sprain in his shoulder with that hit, York told the media Wednesday, but the outdoor Stadium Series game was next up on the schedule and he didn't want to miss it. So he played through, ended up missing no time at all as he went on to play the full 82, and at an even larger 25:06 of average ice time the rest of the way after March 1.
"I probably should have missed a few games," York admitted, but to how him and Sanheim pushed through: "We were both pretty banged up there. But the situation we were in, we had defensemen injured, and when you're right there in the playoff hunt, I think you wanna just lay it all on the line.
"I think we did that," York continued. "So kudos to him. He had a pretty serious thing going on there. We had to battle and grind, but I would say the same thing, just proud of how he handled that. Not an easy situation when you're playing 25-plus a night."
But still one that left the Flyers short of the playoffs after holding on to a spot up until the end, even through all of the season's bizarre ebbs and flows and through many of the expectations that this rebuilding team continually defied.
"Obviously it sucks right now," Sanheim said. "I would like to think that we deserve to be in the postseason, but obviously a bright future. I think there are a lot of guys who had great seasons this year, a lot of steps were made, the locker room was great.
"That's one thing we all discussed behind doors here, that it's just disappointing in the fact that this group isn't going to fully be together again. We're gonna miss each other. We love that group in there and we didnt want this to end. Each day that we came to the rink we loved it, we enjoyed it. I think that's a good thing and something that we can take moving forward.
"There's obviously going to be more challenges along the way. Nothing's going to be easy, nothing's going to be given to us. We're going to have to continue to keep earning it, and this group's gonna need to continue to take steps over the next couple seasons."
But this is a start.
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