Their playoff hopes are nearly gone, but Flyers still need to salvage something out of this

For all intents and purposes, the Philadelphia Flyers’ season ended on Tuesday night in Montreal.

Sure, when everyone wakes up on Wednesday morning, the playoff models will still have their postseason chances at above zero, likely somewhere in the high single digits. In theory, they could still make it.

In reality, however, it would take a miracle on multiple levels for the Flyers to make it to a Game 83.

“This was rock bottom tonight for us,” John Tortorella said to the traveling media after the team’s 9-3 loss to the Montreal Canadiens, which came on the heels of a 6-2 defeat at the hands of the Columbus Blue Jackets just three nights before — a game in which the Flyers laid an egg in the first period and were ultimately blown out by the worst team in the Eastern Conference, a club missing 10 starters due to injury.

This was worse.

For all of the Flyers’ talk about their improved culture, renewed accountability, and even the ‘New Era of Orange,’ this was a throwback game. Not to the legendary days of Flyers past, of the Broad Street Bullies and the tough-as-nails overachievers of the 1980s. No, this was reminiscent of more recent embarrassments.

The 9-0 loss to the Rangers in 2021, followed up by an 8-3 defeat at the hands of the same club a week later.

The 7-1 loss to the Lightning later that calendar year that got Alain Vigneault fired.

The 6-0 thrashing by the Toronto Maple Leafs in 2018 just after Thanksgiving, which led to general manager Ron Hextall’s ouster.

The 6-1 pasting at the hands of the Washington Capitals in the 2016 playoffs, which infamously inspired infuriated fans to chuck light-up bracelets onto the ice.

Losses like this were a defining feature of the Flyers over the past decade. It’s part of why so many fans — long criticized for being too loyal to an organization that hadn’t delivered a championship in decades — slowly started to turn on the Flyers in the back half of the 2010s, and then did so in droves in the early 2020s. It’s why Dan Hilferty and Keith Jones and Daniel Briere had to take the reigns in the first place last year — to signify a clean break with the past, to promise that they’ll never let things get that bad again.

Tuesday night was that bad.

And this team was supposed to be different. Not only were there new faces at the top of the organization, the entire feel around the team itself was unique all year long. Rather than failing to meet expectations, the 2023-24 Flyers exceeded them. Tortorella’s intensity and competitiveness connected with the Philadelphia fanbase in a way that Dave Hakstol’s stoicism and Alain Vigneault’s aloofness never did. Castoffs like Owen Tippett and Sean Walker and Nick Seeler and Ryan Poehling became key contributors. Once-doubted organizational mainstays like Travis Sanheim and Morgan Frost rose to their coach’s challenge and became better players for it.

The vibes around the team were excellent, and the logical assumption — especially after they survived a seven-game March gauntlet against top-tier Eastern Conference opponents — was that even if the Flyers missed the playoffs, they’d be able to hit the offseason with their heads held high, and in turn, the fans could be proud of their team, in a way that they could not over the preceding decade.

Cue this now-eight game losing streak, largely at the hands of standings bottom-feeders.

“Whether it’s enough time to do what we want to do to try to get in (the playoffs), I’m not concerned about that,” Tortorella admitted on Tuesday night. “I’m concerned about just being pros, trying to get some of our dignity back, and just playing the right way. I think that’s the most important part that we’ve got to stay together with.”

Some might argue that, with the playoffs a near-impossibility at this point, the Flyers would be better served just losing out, finishing the season on an 11-game skid that maybe could get them into the top-10 of the first round of the coming NHL draft. There is some wisdom in that — the Flyers desperately need more high-end players, and picking 10th and 12th could be the difference between nabbing a future 1C versus merely a quality winger.

But Tortorella is right. The fans have every right to root for a higher draft pick, especially after suffering through these last eight defeats. But it’s vitally important for the Flyers to regain some of that lost dignity. Because even if their season is technically over, it’s not actually over. There are still at least 180 minutes left before the players can head home for the summer. And if they’re anything like the last 120, that will become the only aspect of this otherwise encouraging Flyers season that anyone — locally or nationally — will remember.

Tortorella surely has heard the speculation that his players are “quitting” on him — he spoke to that very theory last week in a memorable 15-minute press conference, accepting it as a by-product of his preferred style of coaching even while dismissing it as an acceptable excuse for his team’s swoon. And frankly, he’s right. Maybe his recent actions, such as scratching his captain for two games (a card that hadn’t been played by an NHL head coach in a decade) and calling his team soft after a hard-fought OT loss, did rub his players the wrong way; in fact, it would probably be a reasonable response. But given the fact that many of these same players tuned out Alain Vigneault in 2021, and Dave Hakstol in 2018, it would be an embarrassment to do the same for the third time in six years, this time with a playoff berth so close to within their grasp.

If the Flyers lose their final three games in blowout fashion, if they truly pack it in and lose all semblance of the structure and work ethic that got them to this point in the first place, then they prove all of their longtime doubters right. Everyone who watched the previous three seasons and believed that only a full-scale tear-it-down rebuild would be sufficient to remove the apparent rot at the center of this team will look positively clairvoyant.

Yes, the Flyers are surely worn down. Sam Ersson is undeniably tired, by his coach’s own admission. Key players are banged up or running on fumes.

But this isn’t just about securing a few more now-meaningless standings points. It’s about making a convincing final case to the fans and the hockey world at large that this Flyers team is different, that they are truly on the path to renewed relevancy, that even if this season won’t last beyond Game 82, that 2023-24 wasn’t a waste of everyone’s time, a culture-building year that ended up producing the same end result as all of those culture-deficient clubs that pushed the Flyers to embark on a full organizational reset in the first place.

The season may be essentially over in terms of playoff implications now. The Flyers own that failure already. But they still have time to salvage at least some dignity from this debacle.