December 23, 2023
Rick Osentoski/USA TODAY Sports
Flyers winger Garnet Hathaway stays with the puck after losing his glove during Friday night's 7-6 shootout loss to the Red Wings in Detroit.
Ahead of Thursday night's home game against Nashville, John Tortorella wanted the idea of a Flyers playoff push to be the last thing on his mind.
"Don't even start asking me those questions," he told the media from the team's training facility in Voorhees earlier in the day. "We're in the end of December...You don't know what your team is until the end of January."
Nor what the rest of the league is truly made of.
The Flyers reached their Christmas break with a lot of early success, which took much of the hockey world by surprise. They're 18-11-4 and, as of Saturday afternoon, were holding on to second place in the Metropolitan Divison, though with the Islanders, Capitals, and Hurricanes bunched up right behind them.
The club that was supposed to be rebuilding went into Thursday night riding a nine-game point streak behind a solid and relentless stretch of play, and at 7-0-1 in their past eight games to that point, having yet to lose in regulation for the month of December.
But then the Predators – re-shaping the roster themselves – came into the Wells Fargo Center and put up a wall.
The Flyers had established themselves this season as a more defensively sound team with an offense that can use its speed (Travis Konecny, Tyson Foerster, and Morgan Frost), anticipation (Joel Farabee and Sean Couturier), and power (Owen Tippett) to thrive in transition.
It's been working for them going back to November, with victories taken off some quality opponents too, but against a team like Nashville built more on size and heavy checking, that style of play wasn't nearly as potent.
The Flyers were never truly out of Thursday night's 4-2 loss, pressing down to the final seconds until Gustav Nyquist got the puck and buried the empty-netter to put it away, but against the Predators' setup, there was never a real breakthrough. Lanes to hit with speed through center ice were gone, and the Flyers didn't do nearly enough to set up camp in the offensive zone to compensate.
It was a wake-up call, and a taste of what the rest of the season is more than likely going to be when the Flyers return from the break, when the games matter that much more, the emotion is dialed up that much higher, and the hits are delivered that much harder.
"It's stubbornness," Tortorella said postgame Thursday night. "It's a lesson that we learned, but this team is gonna have to forecheck. When this league gets going at the end of Christmas, after the holiday, that's when the grind starts coming in. If we think we're gonna be this high-flying transition team, stretching, and not forecheck, we're in for a rude awakening. We found that out tonight."
And the night after in Detroit, as part of a back-to-back before the pause, it was speed and high-end skill that they fought and clawed all the way back against, but ultimately got done in by in a 7-6 shootout loss.
With Carter Hart back in goal after a bout with a lingering illness that kept him out the past couple of weeks, the Flyers went into the first intermission Friday night near-buried in a 5-1 hole.
Alex DeBrincat, Dylan Larkin, Lucas Raymond, and Patrick Kane – with two goals early – were flying right by them, but the Flyers came back out for the second and adjusted, and after Nick Seeler took exception to a hit along the boards from Christian Fischer, which saw the defenseman leave with a fighting major and a game misconduct from the furious response, Philly slammed its foot on the gas.
They cycled, checked, got traffic in front of the net, and with the help of some huge saves from Hart after a rough start to his return, climbed all the way back. They even took a brief lead before a tough bounce on a late Larkin shot trickled past Hart to force overtime and then eventually the deciding shootout.
It was a remarkable comeback effort stopped just short, though still a point in the standings, and a mark that the Flyers at least can play the harsher style Tortorella's expecting them to be greeted with coming back from the break.
"It's a big learning step for us," winger Garnet Hathaway, who had the goal to cut Detroit's lead down to 1, said afterward Friday night. "It's a stride in the right direction. I don't know, as many cliches as you want to put at it. No one in this room is happy that we lost. Nobody. We're happy that we got one point instead of zero, and that's it. But I think when you talk about how we're gonna continue to grow in this locker room, and how you're gonna see us in the second half of the season after the break, that tonight was huge for our mentality – how we go into games, how we need to compete in games the whole time.
"It's a 60-mintue game, right? We didn't start off on the right foot, we didn't play the first period that we needed to. We played just well enough to get a point, which was really well in the second half of the game, but we have to figure out – that's our next step, I think, just how to play a full 60."
And a step that will be key to figuring out what kind of team the Flyers truly are by the end of January, when the games matter that much more, the emotion is dialed up that much higher, and the hits are delivered that much harder.
The Flyers as an organization are in a rebuild, but the team on the ice has been playing well regardless of the label, and to the surprise of many outside the building.
But can they buckle down and keep this up? Are they ready for what comes next?
"That's the second half of the season," Hathaway said. "Can't change the points we have now, but if we show up with grit in the second half of the year, we're gonna put ourselves in a good spot."
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