Flyers poised to begin toughest stretch of season -- while not firing on all cylinders

A pivotal event that will decide the direction of the remainder of the Philadelphia Flyers’ season occurs in just a few days.

No, not Friday’s trade deadline. The start of the team’s most difficult stretch of games in the 2023-24 season.

“It’s gonna be a good test here this next month, with the schedule we’ve got and the challenges we’ve got coming,” Scott Laughton said on Monday night.

He’s not kidding. Starting with Thursday’s road matchup against the Florida Panthers — who head coach John Tortorella on Monday called “probably the best team in the league right now” — the Flyers kick off a run from March 8 through March 26 that sees Philadelphia face playoff-bound Eastern Conference foes in nine out of ten games.

Two matchups versus those high-flying Panthers.

Two against a Boston club just two points behind Florida in the standings.

Two battles with a star-studded Maple Leafs team.

And then one each against Tampa Bay, Carolina, and the Rangers.

That’s an absolute gauntlet of tough matchups. And after Monday night’s 2-1 shootout defeat at the hands of a painfully middle-of-the-road St. Louis Blues club, it’s unclear that the Flyers are ready for it.

Since storming out of the all-star break with four straight wins, the Flyers have less been excelling, and more simply treading water. They’re an underwhelming 3-4-2 in their last nine games, and the three wins don’t exactly engender serious confidence: a road win over league-worst Chicago that even Torts couldn’t bring himself to praise in its wake, a solid win over Tampa in odd arena circumstances, and then Saturday’s victory over the Senators, that saw the Flyers be carried by a 22-year old rookie.

The issues that have led to the Flyers’ recent struggles were readily apparent on Monday night. Their play in the first period was choppy, and only devolved further in the middle stanza, when they lost control of the middle of the ice and let the Blues storm into their zone with possession of the puck a whopping 16 times at 5-on-5. Even in the third, when they played the kind of complete game that earned Tortorella’s approval, they couldn’t finish on a single one of their many scoring chances in regulation, ultimately leading to their shootout defeat.

It hasn’t been all bad for the Flyers since that four-game post-ASB winning streak came to an end. But instead of dominant 60-minute performances, they’ve delivered a mix of strong and weak periods, impressive and underwhelming stretches.

That’s enough to take down Ottawa and nab a point against St. Louis. But versus Florida and Boston and the rest? Can the Flyers up the quality of their game to handle those kinds of teams?

“I mean, we’re gonna have to,” Travis Sanheim bluntly responded. “That’s the stretch that we’re in. We’ve got to be getting better each and every game.”

The Flyers players, to their credit, are fully aware that they haven’t been playing great hockey. Both Sanheim and Laughton acknowledged after Monday’s defeat that the game was far from their best work. And prior to puck drop, Sanheim went into more detail of what he saw as the team’s biggest current issue.

“I feel like we’ve been, at times, (doing) more lateral plays, and we’ve been turning it over in the neutral zone a little bit more,” he said.

Laughton had a slightly different diagnosis after the game, even if his conclusion — the team needs to be better – was the same.

“I think we need to get back to being a little bit more aggressive on pucks,” he said.
“But we’ll keep working on things and continue to try and get better and get guys going.”

Of course, it’s not like the Flyers are playing terribly. There’s a reason why they still sit in third place in the Metropolitan Division, six points ahead of their current closest competition for the playoff spot, the New York Islanders. The Flyers entered Monday’s game having still driven play at 5-on-5 even during their eight-game “swoon” (51.33 percent expected goal share), and then won the xG battle versus St. Louis by a solid 2.62 – 1.55 margin as well.

And then, as Tortorella himself pointed out, they’re not at full strength, with top scorer Travis Konecny having missed the past six games with an upper body injury.

“We’ve found a way to get points. You gotta remember we’re missing a pretty important guy,” he said. “I think the guys have rallied, found a way to get some points.”

In fact, Tortorella was far more forgiving of his team’s performance — both over the past few weeks generally and on Monday night specifically — than his players were. Rather than harp on the team’s underwhelming work over the first 40 minutes, Tortorella chose to highlight what he saw as a strong response from them in the third period, even if it didn’t produce a goal. And then, given a chance to evaluate where the Flyers’ play stands entering this pivotal, difficult stretch, Tortorella refused to bite.

“I’m not going to assess it to the bones, as far as what you’re looking for,” he responded. “I don’t look at it as looking at the group of games. I’m not going to assess the team for you guys as we go through the (rest of the season). We’re going to worry about each and every day, and just try to be the best we can be.”

There are reasons for optimism. Konecny, for starters, could be back soon — he skated at Monday’s practice (wearing a noncontact jersey), and general manager Daniel Briere noted last Friday that the club was likely targeting a Thursday return for their key forward. Formerly ice-cold depth players like Laughton (who scored another goal on Monday) and Tyson Foerster (who was held off the scoresheet but produced five high-danger chances) are now absolutely flying.

And then, there’s the fact that the teams chasing the Flyers for that final guaranteed Metropolitan Division playoff spot are flailing — particularly the clubs with the highest talent upside. The New Jersey Devils have lost five of seven since topping the Flyers in the mid-February outdoor game, and they just fired head coach Lindy Ruff on Monday. Pittsburgh has lost three straight and appears poised to pivot fully to selling key players like Jake Guentzel. The only clubs putting actual standings pressure on the Flyers right now are an Islanders team with 26 wins and 34 losses, and a Capitals club with a negative-33 goal differential.

Perhaps the Flyers won’t even need to excel during this three-week blitz to secure their first playoff berth since 2020 — they’ll just have to avoid a full-fledged collapse.

But there are also lots of ways this could go bad.

The trade deadline, of course, is coming, and Briere hasn’t ruled out a sell-off, which would weaken the club from a talent standpoint and could drive a stake through their unquantifiable locker room chemistry. Even if the only sell move is trading the soon-to-be-UFA Sean Walker — still the most likely trade for Briere to make — it would kneecap the club’s best and steadiest defensive pairing.

Nick Seeler — Walker’s partner and another trade candidate — took a shot to his left foot on Monday, and even though he returned for the start of the third period, he sat out the final nine minutes of the game (and overtime), leaving his status in doubt both for the deadline and this looming gauntlet of games.

The Flyers’ usual top-of-the-lineup players also haven’t been at their best recently. Sean Couturier is still toiling away on Line 4. Joel Farabee handed Kevin Hayes the Blues’ only regulation goal on Monday night with an ugly turnover. Owen Tippett is back his consistently inconsistent self, following up extremely impactful games with far less assertive ones. Konecny’s return remains uncertain. Laughton and Foerster and Ryan Poehling (the team’s top three forwards on the ice time charts versus St. Louis) are doing their best to pick up the slack, but it’s going to be very difficult to keep that up against the best of the East without help from the big guns. And that’s assuming that Briere doesn’t do anything wild like trade Laughton in an unexpected blockbuster over the next 72 hours, an unlikely but still plausible outcome to all of this.

Still, the Flyers aren’t shrinking from this daunting stretch of games, regardless of the team’s recent results. Tortorella clearly still has his players’ backs, for starters, if his postgame comments on Monday were any indication.

“We’ll be ready to play,” he vowed.

And the players themselves can’t wait to show their stuff in meaningful hockey games.

“This is where we want to be,” Sanheim said. “This is the stretch that we want to be in, where we’ve got a chance to make the playoffs.”

From the outside, the Flyers do not look to be firing on all cylinders, and they appear less than ideally equipped for the brutal schedule that now sits in front of them. But they’ve been proving the doubters wrong all season long — and now, they have an opportunity to do it again.