It's not just that the Flyers now are poised to miss the playoffs -- it's how

Let’s turn the clock back to October of 2023 for a second. We pop out onto Broad Street, and spy a brave soul still sporting an Orange & Black t-shirt, despite the dismal past three seasons, and ask him a simple question:

“If after 78 games, the Flyers are still alive in the Eastern Conference playoff race, would you assume they had a successful season?”

Perhaps we may have stumbled upon a person convinced that the Flyers should tank, or an especially demanding Philadelphian who views every season without a title — regardless of start-of-year expectations — as a failure. But it’s fair to wager that the vast majority of fans in October would have been perfectly satisfied with a competitive season from a Flyers club that had been anything but to that point in the 2020s, going so far as to even announce a rebuild in the summer.

But that’s certainly not how the then-theoretical outcome feels right now.

When the Flyers awoke this morning after their 6-2 shellacking in Columbus at the hands of the Blue Jackets, they were out of a playoff spot for the first time since December. Their postseason odds aren’t zero, but they’re increasingly dismal – 27.1 percent per MoneyPuck, 16 percent via The Athletic, 14.8 percent according to HockeyViz. With four games remaining, they still have a shot, but it’s not a particularly good one.

Just a week and a half ago, the Flyers were still in the playoff driver’s seat. They had survived “the gauntlet” — a seven-game stretch against Eastern Conference juggernauts — and remained solidly in playoff position, nabbing points in four of the seven games and looking competitive in all but one of them. The understandable assumption was that, with the gauntlet now in the rearview mirror, the Flyers were poised to beat up on the significantly weaker opponents looming, and lock down their first playoff spot since 2020.

Instead, they’ve flat out collapsed. Back-to-back losses to Montreal and Chicago last week led head coach John Tortorella to theorize that the team was gassed; an underwhelming effort on Monday against the Islanders (especially in the second period in front of goalie Ivan Fedotov, who was called into action for his NHL debut in relief of a struggling Sam Ersson) led Tortorella to change his tune and challenge his team for perceived “softness” and internal resolve (Torts chose a more colorful word).

The weekend provided an opportunity to put a halt to their five-game swoon, against two more underwhelming opponents in Buffalo and Columbus, the latter holding the fourth-worst record in hockey and missing 10 starters. Second game of a back-to-back notwithstanding, it was as close to a “gimme” game as possible, the perfect time for the Flyers to right the ship.

Instead, they simply failed to show up. The first period numbers tell the tale — at 5-on-5, they lost the shot attempts battle 30 – 10 and trailed in scoring chances an almost unbelievable 14 – 2.

One team didn’t show up, and it wasn’t the club languishing at the bottom of the standings and starting Jet Greaves (he of just five NHL appearances) in goal. It was the team supposedly battling to lock down a playoff spot, with everything on the line.

“I thought we were a little bit sloppy, a little bit loose tonight in front of our goalie,” Tortorella said to the traveling media after the loss. “We’ve just got to get ready to play our next game.”

The Flyers, in short, look cooked. And while they’re not mathematically out of the playoff mix, it certainly feels like their postseason hopes died in Columbus on Saturday night.

Had they delivered this seven-game skid during the gauntlet, that would have been easier for fans to accept. The Flyers were simply outmatched from a talent standpoint, the narrative would have read. They gave it their all against the elite of the East and it just wasn’t enough. But against Montreal, Chicago, Buffalo and Columbus? That explanation doesn’t hold water. Even a middle-of-the-road team should secure a win or two against this kind of competition, and add in the extra motivation of playoff stakes (that none of those opponents could tap into) and their losing streak becomes all the more embarrassing.

The Flyers should be upping their play right now, not going into a free fall. Yes, their current place in the standings exceeds all reasonable preseason expectations. But one cannot divorce that from the undeniable truth of a golden opportunity wasted. Had they simply ended up with a 36-31-11 record through 78 games the normal way — a three-game winning streak here, a 0-2-2 run there — it would have been easier to embrace, if not celebrate. This way? It can only be viewed as a total disappointment.

And it naturally is going to lead to a reassessment of the team, even in comparison to how the group was viewed just a few short weeks ago.

Ersson is at the top of the list. Frankly, there’s a statistical case to be made that the Flyers really aren’t playing that poorly — during this seven-game losing streak, they’ve generated 56.95 percent of the expected goals at 5-on-5 per Natural Stat Trick, and 51.42 percent of them in all situations. The biggest problem by the numbers? They’ve been “expected” to allow 21.12 goals, and they’ve actually given up 33. It’s going to be difficult for any team to survive almost two bad goals allowed per night and rack up wins.

Perhaps with Ersson, this end-of-year collapse is more due to fatigue than talent; only three NHL goalies have more appearances than Ersson since the all-star break. Maybe he’s simply overworked, and his horrid results are a product of circumstance. Tortorella made that case on Thursday.

“The amount that he’s played, it’s almost unfair to look at his numbers, because we’ve put him in that spot,” Tortorella noted.

But the possibility can’t be ruled out that this isn’t fatigue, that it’s actually the NHL catching up to Ersson and exploiting his flaws. At the very least, Ersson no longer engenders the same confidence that the Flyers do truly have a post-Carter Hart long-term solution in goal that he did in mid-February.

Then, there’s the forward corps. It’s no secret that the group isn’t stacked with high-end, dynamic talent the way that their opponents from the gauntlet are. But they do have legitimately good players, ones that either are in the next tier down from superstar or appeared to be establishing themselves at least as quality top-sixers. They just haven’t been playing like it, which is why the Flyers have just 15 goals on about 22 “expected” tallies over the past two weeks.

Travis Konecny is probably receiving a bit too much criticism in fan circles at the moment, especially given the fact that he rushed back from a late February injury and does have 11 points in 15 games since his return. But he’s goalless in his last five, and has been involved in a few memorable breakdowns, namely a late-second period failed clear on Monday vs. New York that ended up in the back of the net and earned the ire of Tortorella. Joel Farabee, on the other hand, has seen his scoring disappear since returning from the all-star break — he has just nine points in his last 29 games. Sean Couturier’s second half decline is easier to explain — he’s gassed after missing a season and a half due to two back surgeries — but given the six years he has left on a contract with a $7.75 million cap hit, the dropoff remains a major concern for what it might mean for the rest of his NHL career.

And then, there’s the newfound concerns about something that was viewed as a strength all year: the culture.

Throughout the season, it became a catch-all explanation for why the Flyers were exceeding expectations. The locker room was so tight. The guys were all playing for each other and backing each other up. Tortorella was implementing the ideal brand of accountability. It all sounded great in the moment, and perhaps it all remains true. But does a team with a strong culture lose seven straight games in the midst of a playoff race? Against a bunch of bottom-of-the-standings teams?

It’s reminiscent a bit of the recent late-season collapse engineered by the Philadelphia Eagles — another club believed to have an impeccable culture prior to everything falling apart. The Eagles were even bringing in perceived character risks like Jalen Carter in part because they were so confident in the strength of their room. But when the going got tough, the Eagles nevertheless faltered. The Flyers are doing the same.

And it naturally throws into question whether everything that appeared strong about this team — the coaching, the commitment, the cohesiveness, the culture — was actually all that sturdy in the first place.

Perhaps this is all unfair. Maybe these last two weeks can be described simply as a goaltending collapse driven in large part by circumstances out of their control (the Carter Hart sexual assault charge) combined with a scoring slump at the worst possible time. Maybe Ersson will be fine when he’s not being deployed like Connor Hellebuyck, and Couturier will bounce back in 2024-25 given a full offseason, and Tortorella’s message hasn’t worn thin in the Flyers’ locker room, and everything will be fine again come September. Maybe the Flyers will even flip the script and win their final four games, defying expectations once more and surging back into playoff position. Stranger things have certainly happened in hockey.

The Flyers do remain functionally tied with the Penguins for the final Eastern Conference playoff spot, even if the Pens own the tiebreaker. They’re guaranteed at least an eight-point improvement in the standings, even if they lose out. They currently rank fifth in the NHL in shots on goal share at 5-on-5 and seventh in xG share (per Evolving-Hockey), speaking to the real structural improvements that they’ve made. Tell that fan from October all of these tidbits — and maybe even let it slip that the team will lose its starting goalie in January and only get a half-season of impact-level Sean Couturier — and their current record and place in the standings would seem nothing but a positive outcome.

Maybe in a few weeks or months, it will indeed be possible to focus on those undeniable positives. But in the here and now, the depth of this late-season collapse has made it impossible. They’ve turned back into a pumpkin, just with that New Era of Orange shade.

It’s true that this could merely be a speed bump on the road to renewed franchise relevancy. The team’s many young players could ultimately benefit from the past two weeks, learning lessons of how to correctly approach meaningful games. This falter could also help the front office to properly identify which roster moves must be made this summer for the team to truly move forward, making them better in the long-term than if they slipped into the playoffs and convinced general manager Daniel Briere that such a special group simply had to stay together at all costs. The sky is not necessarily falling in Philadelphia, regardless of how it feels in the midst of such a dismal stretch.

But this swoon can’t just be waved away entirely. It’s not as simple as saying that on the whole, the Flyers exceeded expectations. The small picture matters, too. And in that small picture, the Flyers had it all right in front of them, and are giving it away, wasting a season’s worth of good work with an ignominious collapse.