I’ve watched the Flyers for 56 years, and that’s why this current slide doesn’t really shock me—even though it’s painful to sit through.
They’ve lost six straight, the schedule ahead is brutal, and injuries are piling up. But the truth is, there were warning signs even when they were playing their best hockey. The same three issues kept gnawing at fans, and now they’re impossible to ignore.
Goaltending
Dan Vladar was always a gamble. Not because he isn’t an NHL goalie, but because he’d never proven he could handle a starter’s workload—he’d never played more than 30 games in a season. Early on, Tocchet clearly pivoted away from Samuel Ersson and leaned into Vladar anyway. He had outplayed Ersson from the outset, but the durability risk was real. Now Vladar is injured for an unspecified amount of time, and the Flyers are back to Ersson just as his play has dipped well below NHL level. There was no margin for error here, and it finally caught up with them. What’s behind Ersson is a re-visiting of last year’s netminding nightmare in the form of Aleksei Kolosov.
Power Play
This isn’t new, and that’s what makes it so frustrating. The Flyers’ power play has lived in the bottom three of the league for most of the last five years. Different coaches, different players—same result. They still don’t have a true No. 1 defenseman to run it or an elite center to drive it. When games tighten up, this flaw never stays hidden.
Talent Level
The Flyers were never realistically going to acquire elite, perennial All-Star talent via trade or free agency without gutting the roster. That reality made the draft paramount. If this rebuild was going to work, they had to take big swings.
That’s why the drafting approach has been so hard to reconcile. This is still the same scouting leadership that, in 2019, passed on the choice of Matt Boldy or Cole Caufield in favor of Cam York and Bobby Brink. More recently, when the rebuild was officially in effect, the Flyers leaned safe again with picks like Jett Luchanko and Oliver Bonk/Nesbitt.
To be fair, there have been hits—but they’re instructive in different ways. Matvei Michkov was the exception: a true swing for elite talent. Tyson Foerster was a find. Cutter Gauthier, meanwhile, was largely a chalk pick at his spot. Those outcomes don’t negate the broader pattern—and that pattern requires an almost perfect hit rate to succeed.
And here’s the uncomfortable truth: there’s no clear No. 1 center or No. 1 defenseman in the pipeline. If those players don’t come from the draft, they have to come through trades or free agency, usually at a massive cost. There are only so many reclamation opportunities like Trevor Zegras that become available.
Put it all together, and this doesn’t feel like a bad week or a temporary slump. It feels like exposure.
This team survives on structure. Once injuries hit, the goalie gamble started to fail, and the power play stayed broken, there was nothing left to fall back on. Fans who’ve been around long enough saw these cracks well before the losses piled up.
I hope they turn it around. I always do. But right now, this feels less like bad luck and more like the reality setting in.
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