Perhaps this Philadelphia Flyers team, against all odds, is a special one

What happened on Thursday night at the Wells Fargo Center, in many ways, doesn’t make sense.

It’s not just that the Philadelphia Flyers took down the Dallas Stars by a 5-1 final score, of course. Outcomes like that happen all of the time in hockey. Teams on the Stanley Cup shortlist have off nights, while bubble clubs and even cellar dwellers can fire on all cylinders for 60 minutes of action. It’s a testament to both the parity of the NHL, and the randomness inherent to a sport played on a sheet of ice. Unexpected results are the norm.

But that’s not what this was.

This was the kind of performance that changes opinions about a team. It’s the kind of game that forces an entire league to stand up and take notice of a club’s obvious quality. And it’s the kind of night that opens a door to an entire world of previously unthinkable possibilities for how said team’s season might play out.

“Going into this game, I think we kinda talked that we wanted to make a statement,” Morgan Frost admitted after the win.

That’s exactly what the Flyers did.

The Flyers didn’t merely defeat the Stars. They annihilated them. If anything, the game’s final statline — 5 goals to 1, a 43 – 16 shots on goal edge — undersells the breadth of Philadelphia’s dominance. At the end of the first period, the Flyers led in shots by an enormous 15 to 1 margin. At the Flyers’ high point of territorial dominance — about 32 minutes into the game — they were outshooting Dallas 28 – 3. They made the Stars look like an AHL team.

And make no mistake: this is a very good Dallas team. They have the fourth-most points in the Western Conference, and the seventh-most in the NHL. They rank in the top half of the league in goals scored, goals against, power play efficiency and penalty kill success rate — and the top-10 in three of the four categories. The Stars are one of the deepest, most balanced clubs in hockey.

“I think they’re probably the best team in the league,” Flyers head coach John Tortorella said in the wake of his club’s victory over them. “I’m not sure what the standings are. I look at their lineup. They’ve got to be one of the best teams in the league.”

And Tortorella’s Flyers made them look foolish.

It’s not even that the Flyers were doing anything mindblowing. Tortorella likes to note that hockey isn’t an overly complicated game at its core, and appropriately, it’s not like his preferred on-ice systems stand as massive tactical leaps forward. More than anything else, the Flyers just outworked and outexecuted the Stars — as they’ve done in so many other games this season.

The Flyers get in the way of shots (20 blocks on Thursday). They make sure to time their stick checks just as opponents are looking to release the puck, bringing dangerous surges to premature halts. They encourage their defensemen to pinch down the boards constantly to keep offensive zone possessions going. They get pucks deep when little space to operate exists, and carry the puck in when just enough space is available. It’s not that the Flyers are doing anything revolutionary — it’s that they’ve showcased an exceptional teamwide understanding of risk/reward on individual plays, and the result is a team that almost always seems to make the “right” on-ice decision.

“They’re a Torts team,” Stars forward Tyler Seguin noted. “You know they come with the gas. They work their butts off. They’re pretty honest players, honest team and you know what to expect.”

But if they knew what to expect from the Flyers, why couldn’t the Stars stop them?

One explanation that can quickly be ruled out: the Flyers out-talented the Stars.

Sure, Dallas was missing all-world blueliner Miro Heiskanen. But they still dressed Jason Robertson, he of the 109-point campaign in 2022-23. Dominant 27-year old two-way center Roope Hintz was still available; so was the ageless wonder Joe Pavelski. Seguin and Jamie Benn — former stars now settled in as quality depth scorers — were in the lineup, as were blue-chip youngsters Wyatt Johnston and Thomas Harley. Even without Heiskanen, the Stars are loaded.

The Flyers, on the other hand?

In recent weeks, some fans — eager to jump on board the train — now contend that the Flyers are actually stacked with talent. And there’s some truth to the argument: players like Travis Sanheim, Sean Walker, Nick Seeler and Joel Farabee in particular were clearly dramatically underrated last summer. But the “Flyers lack high-end talent” stance isn’t merely held by curmudgeonly local beat writers. It’s the leaguewide consensus, and the view of the vast majority of hockey fans all over the country.

The Flyers have a lot of good players, yes. They even have a few great ones. But do they have a single player with a stone-cold case to be considered one of the top 50 players in hockey right now? It’s far from a lock.

The Flyers’ best defenseman struggled to crack the top 50 in popular analytics account JFresh’s public ranking poll of merely the top NHLers at his position right now — he’s not making a top 50 list that includes forwards and goalies. Sean Couturier barely cracked the back half of the top 50 in TSN’s player poll back in 2020 and 2021, and that was when he was still in his twenties and had yet to undergo two back surgeries. As for Travis Konecny, the team’s top scorer? He’s undeniably having a stellar season — but even this performance ranks him merely tied for 44th in points, behind a five defensemen as well as lots of higher-profile forwards.

This isn’t a team carried by stars. It’s a Team with a capital “T.”

“Guys go out there and play for each other,” Scott Laughton said. “It doesn’t matter what happens in a game, the bench never gets too low or too high. We just go out there and play.”

The Flyers’ early-season success was a pleasant surprise for all but the most ardent supporters of an organization-wide tank. But for three and a half months, the smart money was on the team’s glaring talent deficiencies at the top of their lineup — at least in comparison to the vast majority of playoff contending clubs — eventually catching up with them. Chemistry and comradery are great, but there’s a reason why the Cup champion almost every year seems to have two or three future Hall of Famers on its roster. Eventually, the absence of those stars was going to catch up with the Flyers, and the losses would follow.

Right?

Well, maybe not.

After Thursday’s victory, the Flyers now sit second in the Metropolitan Division. They have the ninth-best points percentage in hockey. They’ve beaten all of the Jets, Canucks (twice), Avalanche, Golden Knights, Kings, Hurricanes, Oilers, and now Stars. Their 5-on-5 advanced metrics remain pristine (52.86 percent expected goal share). The goaltending has been well above league average. Aside from the on-paper talent concern, the Flyers certainly look the part of a contending club, with the kind of resume that supposed Cup hopefuls like Toronto and Tampa Bay — who do actually have those stars — would kill to own right now.

What if the Flyers can keep all of this up, even absent the superstars that carry most other clubs hovering around Philadelphia in the standings? What if the Flyers’ vibes are just that good? What if they are something of a team of destiny?

Those types of clubs don’t come around often, even as NHL GMs managing talent-deficient teams try and fail on a yearly basis to “find the right mix” to return their franchises to prominence (and keep their jobs as a result). But it does happen from time to time.

PHLY Flyers co-host Bill Matz has wondered aloud in recent weeks if a “rebuilding” team has ever won the Stanley Cup; the answer is likely no, depending upon your view of the 2005-06 Carolina Hurricanes. But there is one recent team that came close — a team without true stars that entered the season with the primary plan of accumulating assets for the future, but instead rode commitment to a strong on-ice system, “nobody believes in us” motivation, and impeccable vibes all the way to a Cup Final appearance.

That team? The 2017-18 Vegas Golden Knights.

People spent the entire season waiting for the expansion Golden Knights — built from the unprotected scraps of the other 30 NHL clubs — to collapse. It just never happened, at least until Alexander Ovechkin and the Capitals steamrolled them on their way to getting No. 8 his first (and still only) championship ring. Vegas rode a wave, and it didn’t peter out until June, when the Knights were one of just two teams still standing.

The Flyers, at least right now, are doing something similar.

“When everyone’s playing well, it’s fun, and it keeps going and gives everyone confidence,” Owen Tippett said.

The positive vibes surrounding the Flyers continue to reach new heights. The team is a tight-knit group, constantly sticking up for each other on the ice and keeping things light off of it. The organizational leaders proved last week that they can weather a crisis and rally even more fans to the cause in the process. The Wells Fargo Center has been packed for games for the better part of a month now. Owen Tippett — perhaps the middle-of-the-lineup piece most likely to take a true star turn in the next 2-3 seasons as Vegas’ Shea Theodore ultimately did — now has two consecutive games with tallies that double as “Goal of the Year” candidates. The team is apparently now using the saxophone solo from ‘Run Away’ by SunStroke Project — recently re-popularized on TikTok and other social media platforms due a viral clip of the Pokémon Squirtle playing a saxophone along with the song — as part of their increasingly unique locker room victory celebrations.

Even Tortorella isn’t trying to throw cold water on their achievements anymore, after spending most of the first three months promising fans that losses and pain were still looming.

“We played a really good game,” Tortorella acknowledged on Thursday. ‘”I’m not going to sit here and try to be a coach and say ‘you’ve got to do this’ — we played a hell of a hockey game.”

Perhaps the Flyers are indeed in the midst of doing what a few short months ago seemed unimaginable. Maybe they’ve fallen into the the perfect mix of players, a group far better than the sum of its parts. Perhaps the long-predicted regression never comes, solidifying a winning culture essentially out of nowhere, and allowing GM Daniel Briere to spend the next few years going star hunting with the goal of putting an already-competitive group over the top, the way that Vegas did in the wake of their surprising early success.

Does it still feel unlikely, especially after watching many of these same players underwhelm on three straight bad Flyers teams? Sure.

But games like Thursday’s thrashing of Dallas make it at least appear possible. So why not root for them to somehow keep it going?

“Hopefully we keep on riding it – ride the momentum and keep on trying to play,” Tortorella said. “I’m not gonna get ahead. We’ll just get ready for tomorrow, and get ready for our (next game).”

And maybe tomorrow, all of this will finally start to make sense.