Dan Vladar said he owes Emil Andrae a steak.
With Thursday night’s game against the Blues tied late into the third period, the puck took a loud thud off Vladar’s pad and to the opposite side of the crease, where St. Louis center Daliobr Dvorsky had picked up the rebound and was ready to fire the go-ahead goal away.
Vladar fell to his back with his glove outstretched in desperation, but in front of him, Emil Andrae dropped to his knees and absorbed the shot himself, which let his teammates finally clear the puck out and take it the other way.
The Flyers held on to force overtime, and went on to win, 3-2, in front of the home crowd at Xfinity Mobile Arena.
That moment from Andrae saved them. It got himself a free dinner courtesy of his goaltender, too, and may have just kept the 23-year-old defenseman in the NHL for the long haul.
Because it wasn’t just that crucial shot block that Andrae made late on Thursday night. That was just the exclamation point. He was excellent and contributed to the Flyers’ comeback win throughout. Moreover, head coach Rick Tocchet saw the avenue to reward him for it midgame.
Andrae started Thursday night’s game on the third defensive pairing with Noah Juulsen, but by the second period, Tocchet and assistant coach Todd Reirden liked the way Andrae was skating and were considering bumping him up to the second pair to play alongside Jamie Drysdale.
They pulled the trigger, and Andrae made sure the decision paid off.
The new second pairing had a stronger jump to it, Andrae placed a couple of solid shots on net himself, skated 19:30 of ice time (his second-highest total of the season), and had the assist on Tyson Foerster’s tying goal in the third period – when he recovered the puck up high and slid it across for Foerster to tee up a beam of a slapshot on as the two nearest Blues skaters both committed to chasing Andrae as the initial puck carrier.
Then the puck fell to a dangerous spot in front of the Flyers’ crease late, and Andrae squared up to stop the shot. That was huge, and might have been the moment that cemented his status: He can’t go back to the AHL.
“He gets up, didn’t quit,” Tocchet said of Andrae’s blocked shot postgame. “That’s what we need, more guys doing that. Little desperate…It’s good.”
The start of the 2025-26 season hadn’t been kind to Andrae. He got lost in the defensive shuffle in camp, and was cut and assigned to the Lehigh Valley Phantoms as a mobile but undersized defenseman at a point where the organization had made it clear with their recent draft that its long-term goal was to get bigger and meaner.
He stayed on the NHL roster bubble, and got recalls when Cam York and Tyson Foerster both went down for a bit with injury, but it still left the defenseman in limbo.
This stay on the Flyers’ roster, though, seems to be moving him out of it, and in the right direction.
In seven games this month, Andrae’s ice time has gradually increased toward the 20-minute mark, and in the past three, he’s become a greater presence with the puck on his stick, posting three assists and a plus-4 rating, which included a breakout two-assist night in last week’s 6-5 shootout win at St. Louis.
Then the Flyers came home after a four-day layoff, and Andrae delivered another strong effort against the Blues.
“I just felt Emil was…he’s been playing pretty good for us, right?” Tocchet said after this Thursday night’s win. “He’s one of our better guys that goes back and wheels the puck and makes an outlet pass. Even on the blue line, juking players and stuff like that, so keep working with him and he’ll get some more ice time.”
Up in the NHL with the Flyers, though. He’s skating well with them right now, and after all, his goalie does owe him a steak.
“I think, still, I have stuff that I can improve from tonight,” Andrae said from the Flyers’ locker room. “I think the things I did well were get up in the play, created a lot of offense, and moved the puck quick.
“But I think just overall defense and being strong on the walls, I think that can be a better improvement going from here. But yeah, I think it was a step forward, just trying to keep building on this.”
The greater fight
Thursday night’s game was also the Flyers’ annual Hockey Fights Cancer night.
As always, the Flyers entered the arena wearing purple-accented jerseys, wrote the names of loved ones battling cancer on the support posters lined along the tunnel to the ice, and skated out for warmups with Hockey Fights Cancer toques on their heads, and all the ads on the boards changed to purple to reflec the theme.
This year’s night had a bit extra, though.
Vladar and Sam Ersson skated out with new goalie masks, and the skaters with SkateSkins (attachable labels on the side of their skates), all displaying the drawings of kids battling pediatric cancer, who were all invited out to Voorhees to meet the team earlier in the week.
Jason Myrteus, the Flyers’ longtime radio broadcaster, dropped the ceremonial puck alongside his team of Penn Medicine doctors – Dr. Daniel Altman, Dr. Erica Petke, and nurse practitioner Heather Levinsky – cancer-free and to a big standing ovation just shy of a year after he announced his Stage 3 colorectal cancer diagnosis. (Myrteus’s interview with NHL analyst and fellow cancer survivor Eddie Olczyk, which he recorded prior to Thursday night, is also a highly recommended listen that you can check out HERE.)
Layon Kovol, a local teenage goalie who raised more than $6,000 for the October Saves fundraising initiative while his mother, Jamie, battles brain cancer, read off the Flyers’ starting lineup in the locker room.
Fifteen-year-old Layton Kovall, Pennsylvania’s top fundraiser for the 2025 October Saves campaign, delivered tonight’s starting lineup read.
Layton, whose mother is battling brain cancer, raised more than $6,000 for cancer research. 👏#STLvsPHI | @Toyota pic.twitter.com/WUEYAxLr6S
— Philadelphia Flyers (@NHLFlyers) November 21, 2025
Then, during the second intermission, several guests of the Flyers rung a bell in the lower bowl of the arena, signaling that their cancer treatments were complete to the entire crowd as anthem singer and another fellow cancer survivor in Lauren Hart performed OneRepublic’s “I Lived.”
The Flyers always do an excellent job with their Hockey Fights Cancer nights and honoring all those in the battle.
But this year, there was more weight to it, and they went above and beyond.
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