When the Flyers take on New Jersey Saturday night, they will be playing their twentieth game of the season. The quarter pole is often a decent sample size of where a team is at or, more importantly, where it isn’t. Philadelphia still isn’t looking for its first win of the year, so that’s a good thing. Some might argue facetiously they’re still seeking their first five-on-five goal but they’ve done that too. Not a lot, but they’ve reached that achievement. The Flyers still haven’t been shutout yet, another plus. And they are now four games over .500 in the National Hockey League Standings.
The optimist would look and argue they’ve only come up empty in six out of 19 games this year, meaning two-thirds of the time they’ve moved or inched up in the standings with a point or two. Yet one huge concern which might be posing a bit of a problem is that the Flyers have all of four regulation wins. Prior to Friday’s action, the four was the least out of all the Metropolitan Division teams. They were six regulation wins back of Pittsburgh and Washington (both with 10) and five behind Carolina and the Islanders (both with nine). Heck, even the lowly New York “can’t score at home” Rangers have eked out seven regulation wins. Meanwhile when looking at the Atlantic Division, only Montreal, Buffalo (five each) and Toronto (six each) are within spitting distance of them in terms of this statistic.
People might feel that if the Flyers are winning, it shouldn’t matter how they get the Ws. They would be correct. If Trevor Zegras continues his wizardry in the shootouts, and Philadelphia churns out overtime wins like they did against St. Louis on Thursday night, then great. If the goaltending stones the opposition, great! Two points is still two points at the end of the season. Unfortunately, given how closely packed teams are this far into the season, teams need to keep winning to stay in the hunt. A four-game or five-game winless (or pointless) streak would make things difficult. The biggest concern if believing the Flyers have a chance at a wildcard spot may come down to tiebreakers. And the first tiebreaker is regulation wins. Not wins in overtime or in the shootout, but wins that saw Philadelphia defeat their opponent in sixty minutes. No extra session or sessions required.
Last season the Flyers had 21 regulation wins. So doing the layman’s math, they are essentially on pace for probably 16 to 18 regulation wins this season. That’s not a lot. And it’s miles from where they need to be in terms of being a seeded team in the Eastern Conference. Or of earning a wildcard spot. Last year Washington (43), Carolina (42), Toronto (41), and Tampa Bay (41) were the class of the East. Florida (37) and New Jersey (36) rounded out the top three seeds in each respective division. As for the wildcard seedings, Ottawa (35) and Montreal (30) all had a decent glut of victories without the need of a three-point game. Looking back at the last few seasons post-pandemic, the team with the lowest amount of regulation wins to eke their way into the playoffs was the New York Islanders in 2023-24. They squeaked in with a rather lowly 29 regulation wins in a season where they had ample games go into three-point game territory.
Outside of that outlier, the average would suggest that the Flyers need between 32 to 35 regulation wins to be in the conversation of a playoff spot. In 2021-22 Washington earned a spot with 35 regulation wins while the following year both the Islanders and Panthers had 36 of them, the fewest of the eight Eastern Conference teams in those years. The lone outliers from that number was in 2023-24 where the Leafs nabbed a playoff berth with 33 and Washington with 32. Needless to say, all of those numbers are a long way from the current four that Philadelphia has.
So what does this all mean?
The Flyers shouldn’t change their structural framework having so few regulation wins so far. It’s not to the point of pulling Dan Vladar or Sam Ersson in a tie game late in regulation to go for the win before overtime. That’s just asinine thinking. There’s a lot of hockey left to be played. What’s quite apparent is that the Flyers have their work cut out for them when it comes to the rest of the season. It’s conceivable they win a slew of games in shootouts and overtimes and end up edging other teams for a wildcard spot by a point or two. Going down that path is needing to play almost perfect hockey in a season where the scheduling is nothing short of hellacious on both sides of the Winter Olympics. With 63 games left prior to the Devils tilt, the math would suggest the Flyers need to win between 28 to 31 more games in regulation alone to make a playoff spot more realistic. So just about half of their games need to be regulation wins for Philadelphia. If they end up in a tiebreaker situation, Philadelphia will lose that easily with so few victories after three periods.
In terms of the bigger picture, getting victories is important in creating a level of play that should help push a rebuild along. Philadelphia talked about adding pieces this season and they still might do that depending on how the next 40 to 45 games pan out. And wins are always good, regardless of how they might be achieved. What’s quite evident though is this manner of wins is often the exception when it comes to teams wanting to get into the playoffs. Philadelphia could get there this way in 2025-26, but it’s an anomaly most of the time. It becomes even tougher when you look at divisional games. Trying to gain on division rivals requires regulations wins, gaining a pair of crucial points on the likes of the Penguins, Capitals, or Islanders while they gain none. Three-point games are rarely the recipe for creating distance between teams in the standings. Otherwise, you would have to be damn near perfect in those contests to create any sliver of breathing room in the Metropolitan Division.
Philadelphia hit 30 regulation wins as recent as 2023-24 before plummeting down to 21 last season. In the pandemic-shortened season of 2019-20, they ended up with 31 of them in 69 games. That’s close to a 50 per cent success rate in terms of shutting down an opponent without giving them a loser point. If Philadelphia sees themselves as a playoff team this season, Flyers head coach Rick Tocchet and his staff are going to have to find ways of scoring more than their opponent in 60 minutes. And probably much sooner than later. Otherwise, all the dramatic, exciting, and nerve-wracking overtime and shootout sessions probably won’t account for anything other than a first-round pick somewhere in the middle come next June.