From the Lottery To the Final Four!

There's not many things in sports quite as satisfying as a team coming together at exactly the right time. We haven't had the privilege of that happening to many of our Philly teams over the years, but I think our Flyers are close to something really great happening in our city. To my eye, this team is starting to get a worst to first, '93 Phils feel to them. They even have the Mitch Williams type flair for the dramatics with their inability to hold leads.

Right now, the Flyers have all 18 skaters playing as a team. These are not the Eric Lindros era Flyers where we have one dependable line and an entire team of supporting characters. Different lines step it up every night. The current team has three lines that can score and play defense, and a fourth line that brings energy and puck possession. The defensive corps is quite possibly the best we've had since the Keenan era. The top pairing is as good as any left in the playoffs and the second pairing isn't bad either. Plus, now that Stevens has finally realized that Kukkonen is a better option than Modry, the third pairing isn't such a detriment anymore.

They seem to have a ton of intangibles going for them. Since none of us are in "the room", it's hard to say for sure, but this team certainly seems to have a ton of leadership coming to the forefront right now. I love the resiliency with which they play. Nothing seems to bother them all that much. They just keep plugging along from game to game and series to series.

Most importantly, Mar-TAN BEE-ron is playing excellently right now. He's making the big save at the right time and giving us a chance to win every game. For once, it has been nice to see one of our goal tenders get inside a team's head instead of the other way around. Seriously, when is the last time that happened? The last goalie to do that in Orange & Black, has to be Hextall back in '87, right?

While watching the series against the Canadiens, I had a bout of deja vu. The way the Flyers beat the Habs seemed to be the textbook manner in which the Devils have toyed with the Flyres for the past decade. I've always come away from Devils losses saying to myself, "how did we lose that game? We outshot and outchanced them. They just scored on a couple lucky bounces and we couldn't convert ours." It's nice to finally be the team that maximizes their chances while letting the more "offensively gifted" team compile shots and chances from the perimeter.

Later in the week, I'll get into how we match up with Pittsburgh and how I see that series ending up, but let's enjoy this one for a while. Post season series victories like this don't come around too often, so we should definitely savor them.