Amid the most optimism and the highest expectations around them in years, the Flyers opened their regular season Wednesday night and were bad. More than just bad, actually. They were horribly bad. They were terribly bad. They were Plan 9 from Outer Space bad, left-the-milk-out-too-long bad, Andy Dalton-on-third-and-goal bad. They were the kind of bad that stops being surprising and interesting and starts being embarrassing and … just more embarrassing. They were so bad that the Xfinity Mobile Arena staff could have played the final scene from Seven on the videoboard and it would have lifted everyone’s spirits.
What’s in the box? Not the Flyers. They were nowhere to be found.
They lost 7-0 to the Pittsburgh Penguins — their fiercest rival, the team they knocked out of the playoffs last season — in a game so one-sided that it’s a wonder they allowed themselves to be introduced before the opening faceoff. If your effort is going to be that pitiful, just stay in the locker room to spare the sellout crowd the few seconds of getting their hopes up. The Mites on Ice could have booed them. Gritty should go into hiding. Lauren Hart should have told everyone she had laryngitis.
“You saw it,” coach Rick Tocchet said. “Obviously, I don’t have an answer. I don’t think we won a battle. They outcoached us tonight. They outplayed us. They did everything better than us tonight.”
Was this the worst loss in Flyers history? No, but you have to give the club credit for trying. There was defenseman Cam York, attempting a behind-the-back pass near the Pittsburgh blue line, turning the puck over, and creating an odd-man rush and scoring chance for the Penguins. There was Travis Konecny, streaking down the right wing, puck on his stick, clean shot there to be taken, throwing a tough cross-ice pass that Tyson Foerster couldn’t handle, as if Konecny’s postseason scoring bugaboo was still hounding him like a ghost. There were the team’s two most promising players, Porter Martone and Matvei Michkov, doing silly things — the former taking a cross-checking penalty that led to an Evgeni Malkin power-play goal and getting demoted from one of the team’s top two lines, the latter staying on the ice too long on too many shifts.
“We had a lot of snowblowers,” Tocchet said. “We have plays where we don’t go through people. … I don’t know if guys are reading their press clippings. I don’t know, but it wasn’t good.”
It was just one game out of the 84 the Flyers will play this season, yes, but Lord, was it ugly. They were lackluster in their final exhibition game last week, losing 5-1 to the Washington Capitals, and both Tocchet and team captain Sean Couturier suggested that a pattern might be developing within a still-young, still-inexperienced team that failed to prepare properly for the regular season. “Everyone’s like, ‘Oh, it’s training camp. We’ll ease our way into the season,’” Couturier said. “We’ve got to wake up here.”
That was the startling part — that the Flyers weren’t as juiced as their fans were, that they seemed to be skating through sludge, to be completely uninterested in building on the good feelings they had established last spring. Just six months ago, they charged into the postseason, beat the Penguins in six games, and left to a standing ovation despite getting swept by the eventual Stanley Cup champions, the Carolina Hurricanes. On Wednesday night, they were outshot 38-19, generated no offense or cohesion on their three power plays, and so infrequently threatened to score that Penguins goaltender Artūrs Šilovs could have played Solitaire in his crease all night and barely bothered to look up.
In one memorable second-period sequence, defenseman Nick Seeler, with teammate Owen Tippett prone on the ice several feet in front of him, flicked a shot toward Šilovs anyway. The puck plunked Tippett in the head. It was only a matter of time, though, before someone topped it, and goalie Dan Vladař did late in the third period, when a shot by Nick Robertson sailed wide and caromed into the crease, where Vladař kicked it into the net for a short-handed goal.
“There’s no panic, nothing,” Couturier said. “But we’ve got to realize that what happened last year is last year.”
Look, if you want to chalk up what happened Wednesday night to the randomness of hockey and the strangeness inherent in pro sports, you certainly can. Again, there are 83 games left before everything really matters. But at the risk of reading too much into the end of the Flyers’ 2025-26 season and the beginning of their 2026-27 season, it’s worth noting that technically they have lost seven of their last eight games.
They have not played a strong full game in a long time, and they had their head coach sounding like a man without an explanation for a humiliating night. “Some plays we were making, they were disturbing plays,” Tocchet said. “We’ve got to figure this out quickly.” Ernest Hemingway once wrote, “Man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.” The Flyers now have to prove they agree with the second part.
