PHILADELPHIA — Two weeks ago, if you’d told a Flyers fan to circle a Saturday afternoon game against the Anaheim Ducks on the calendar, they’d have asked you what was wrong with you. Two weeks ago this team was 0-6-3, nine games into the worst start in franchise history, and the only thing circling South Philadelphia was the vultures.
Funny how fast hockey can turn.
The Flyers host the Ducks this afternoon chasing a fourth straight win, and I don’t use the word “chasing” lightly, because this is a team that spent the first three weeks of the season being chased. They couldn’t finish. They couldn’t get a save at the right time. They couldn’t buy a bounce. And then, somewhere in the wreckage of that nine-game winless hole, the kids decided they’d had enough.
How the turn happened
It started with a 3-1 win over Ottawa that finally got the monkey off their backs, and it has not stopped. Then — and this is the one that made the rest of the league sit up — they beat the Colorado Avalanche, one of the genuine Stanley Cup favorites, 3-2. You don’t fluke your way past Colorado. You earn it, shift by shift, and these young Flyers earned it. Two nights later, they won in Buffalo, too.
The engine, the reason any of this is possible, is Matvei Michkov. The kid is unleashed. He put two goals on the board against the Avalanche and has been the straw that stirs the drink during this whole turnaround, the rare young player who gets better and hungrier the bigger the moment. We were told Michkov was special when he got here. What we’re watching now is special showing up when the team needed it most — which is a different, harder thing, and the thing that separates good players from the ones you build around.
A familiar name
But my favorite story of this stretch isn’t on the scoresheet in the way you’d expect. It’s a name: Knuble. The Flyers were so banged up — Owen Tippett, Tyson Foerster and Travis Konecny all out — that they reached down to the Phantoms and called up Cole Knuble, who made his NHL debut in the middle of all this. If that last name rings a bell for anyone who watched this team in the 2000s, it should. Cole’s father is Mike Knuble, the old Flyers winger who made a living doing the dirty work in front of the net. Mike played 362 games for the Flyers, playoffs included, and now his son wears the same sweater.
Think about that for a second. A kid grows up in and around NHL rinks watching his dad grind out a career, and then, on a night his team is desperate and short-handed, he pulls the same sweater over his head. That’s the stuff that makes this sport worth covering. It’s why I’ve loved the grind since I was a kid going to games — the backup, the call-up, the guy nobody projected, getting his shot because somebody got hurt and the team needed him to be ready. Cole Knuble was ready.
That’s the stuff that makes this sport worth covering.Jake Sullivan
Feet on the ground
Let’s keep our feet on the ground, because I’d be doing you a disservice if I didn’t. Three wins don’t erase an 0-6-3 start. At 3-6-3, the Flyers are still digging out of a hole, and the math of an NHL season is unforgiving — every point they coughed up in early October is a point they’ll be begging for in March. Rick Tocchet’s group has a long, long way to go before anyone starts talking playoffs without lowering their voice. Anaheim is young and fast and perfectly capable of ending this little run this afternoon.
But here’s what three straight wins buy a team that had nothing a week ago: belief, and a reason to show up. The Flyers gave their fans a Saturday afternoon worth caring about, which two weeks ago felt impossible. For a franchise that’s spent a few hard years in the wilderness, that’s not nothing. That’s the first thing.
Puck drops this afternoon. Bring the kids. This team’s playing like it remembers how to have fun — and in South Jersey, where a Flyers sweater still gets handed down from parent to kid like the Knubles’ did, that’s always been the whole point.
Based on reporting from Broad Street Hockey, NBC Sports Philadelphia, PhillyVoice, The Hockey News, and NHL.com.