Philadelphia Flyers: No Stanley Cup Playoffs today

The Philadelphia Flyers were ticketed for a spot in the Stanley Cup Playoffs, making today an especially painful day for fans.

The NHL should have wrapped its regular season on Saturday, setting off the best postseason in sports. And the Philadelphia Flyers, thanks to their strong play since the start of the new year, were all set to be firmly in “the dance”, continuing a streak where they’ve made the Stanley Cup Playoffs in every even-numbered year since 1996. It’s true; look it up.

More from Philadelphia Flyers

It’s my best guess that the Stanley Cup Playoffs would have started tonight for them. And though we can’t know for certain, all projections and reasonable assumptions about how the rest of the regular season would have gone lead us to believe that they would have opened the first round with home ice advantage.

It would have been the first time since the second round in 2012 (a loss to the Devils) that the Flyers had home ice for a series. They haven’t won a round since then, going 0 for 3 as the lower seed each time. But this year certainly felt different.

Their opponent? Maybe Carolina or Columbus, especially if the Flyers had managed to overtake the Capitals for the Metro Division crown. Perhaps even the New York Islanders would have been on tap. But my money was on the series that everyone wanted to see, a showdown with the hated Pittsburgh Penguins in the division’s 2-3 matchup.

It would have been amazing, especially with a rejuvenated Flyers fanbase rocking the Wells Fargo Center and filling it to the brim, nearly 20,000 strong.

We were all robbed.

This isn’t to say that the NHL won’t get back to playing games this season. There’s still a chance. Hope has dimmed, of course, and the scenario of “playoff hockey” this year might include bizarre features like empty stands and designated neutral settings for all the games. In effect, they would be the Stanley Cup Playoffs in name only, because you can’t replicate the charge that you get from being a part of playoff hockey in its natural form at a team’s own building in front of its fans.

The first round of the playoffs are especially awesome, with multiple games per night and the possibility of sudden death always looming. There’s really nothing like it in all of sports. And the Flyers were set to be a big part of it this spring, icing their best team in years.

What an all-out bummer.

How great would it be to see the Flyers facing off against Sidney Crosby and the Pens tonight? Despite Pittsburgh being a formidable opponent, I’m confident that this Flyers team would have found a way to beat them, buoyed by the home ice advantage that they had earned. I’m thinking that we were in store for a fantastic six-game series, maybe even seven. Imagine if these teams met in Philly for a Game 7 a couple weeks from now. Absolute pandemonium. I can’t help but feel bitterly disappointed about missing out on something like that.

Next. Flyers Grades: Scott Laughton. dark

Even though we are all bemoaning the absence of sports right now, I’m hard-pressed to conjure up a team and its fans who have a stronger case for disappointment than the Flyers do. This sports world pause, while completely validated, couldn’t have come at a worse time for an organization that was finally doing what it needed to do. For now, all we can do is cling to the hope that this team might still have a shot to hoist the Cup “this season”, regardless of what form a potential Stanley Cup Playoffs might take.

Home/Philadelphia Flyers