A week ago, if you told a Flyers fan that this team would beat the Colorado Avalanche on a Monday night, they’d have asked which Colorado you meant. The Flyers had opened the season 0-6-3 — nine games without a win, the worst start anyone around the Wells Fargo-turned-Xfinity Mobile Arena could remember — and the whole thing had the sour, familiar smell of another lost winter in South Philadelphia.
Then something happened. The Flyers started winning.
On Monday night, Matvei Michkov scored twice and Philadelphia held off the Avalanche 3-2, and here’s the part that still feels strange to type: that was their second win in a row. Two nights after they finally broke through against Ottawa for the first win of the season, the Flyers did it again, and against better competition. A team that couldn’t buy a goal in September is suddenly 2-6-3 and playing like it believes something.
Michkov lets it come to him
Michkov is the reason, and if you’ve got a kid who plays rec hockey at the Flyers Skate Zone in Voorhees or Pennsauken, this is the guy you want them watching. He’s young, he’s electric, and for the first few weeks of the season he looked like he was pressing — trying to win games by himself, forcing plays that weren’t there. Monday he just let it come to him. A power-play goal at 7:41 of the first. Another in the second. The kind of quiet, lethal two-goal night that stars have when they stop fighting the game and start trusting it.
“I feel so good on ice,” Michkov said afterward, “and I think I have energy for the season.” After the way this thing started, that sentence ought to be printed on a banner.
Help all over the ice
He had help, which is the other reason this run might actually mean something. Trevor Zegras set up three goals — three — and looked like the playmaker this team traded for and then waited on. Noel Acciari finally got his first of the season, the kind of hard-nosed depth goal that wins games in February. And in net, Joseph Woll turned away 24 shots, including a handful in the third period when Colorado was pushing and the old Flyers — the ones from two weeks ago — would have folded.
They didn’t fold. That’s the thing coach Rick Tocchet keeps circling back to, and I think he’s right to. “I just saw a lot of buy-in tonight,” Tocchet said. He’s not selling a miracle. He’s selling habits — blocked shots, clean breakouts, four lines competing — the unglamorous stuff that a young team either learns or doesn’t. For nine games it didn’t look like it was landing. The last two nights, it did.
Keep your heads
Let’s keep our heads here, because Flyers fans have been burned enough to earn their caution. Two wins don’t erase an 0-6-3 hole. This team has dug itself a early-season ditch that will take months of steady work to climb out of, and the schedule doesn’t get easier. One good Monday against Colorado doesn’t make a playoff team.
But I’ve covered enough hockey, and enough kids grinding through 6 a.m. practices at rinks across South Jersey, to know that confidence is a real thing and it compounds. A team that has forgotten how to win has to be reminded, one night at a time. The Flyers have been reminded twice now. Michkov looks like a star again. Zegras looks like himself. And Tocchet, for the first time this season, has something to point to besides effort.
A team that has forgotten how to win has to be reminded, one night at a time.Jake Sullivan
It’s a long way back. But for the first time since September, the Flyers are pointed in the right direction — and after the start they had, that’s a story worth telling.
Based on reporting from NHL.com, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and NBC Sports Philadelphia.