The Philadelphia Flyers are facing a long offseason. They were officially eliminated from playoff contention on Saturday, but are there lessons to be learned in this lost season?
Now that the Philadelphia Flyers have been mathematically eliminated, I find myself reflecting on this season. A season that saw fan favorite goalie Ron Hextall fired as General Manager, along with the not-so-favorite coach Dave Hakstol.
The same season which cost the Flyers Wayne Simmonds and saw the return of James van Riemsdyk. A season that saw the emergence of Travis Sanheim, Oskar Lindblom, and Philippe Myers on defense, and a bit of a stumble for Ivan Provorov and the guy we call Ghost Bear.
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While I can’t forget Gritty, the biggest moment of this season is obviously the highly anticipated debut of franchise goalie and superstar to be Carter Hart. Hart had his moments of brilliance, but reflected the team with a few stumbles as well.
This season saw changes for the team and for this Flyers fan as well. I long ago accepted that this year’s rendering of the team I have loved for a lifetime will not be in the postseason dance. In years past, I would be angry and bitter over this, but this year saw a change in how I watch this game, and the men that lace up the skates to play it. I realized that while I love the Philadelphia Flyers, this game is more than a business.
As I watched Claude Giroux and Jakub Voracek embrace Wayne Simmonds after the Stadium Series win over the Penguins that would be his last game as a Flyer, a nagging voice finally came to the front of my head. As Simmonds discussed not wanting to leave Philadelphia, he announced that his wife was six and half months pregnant with their first child, so it had been a little more than hockey on his mind.
It hid me hard at that very moment that these men, all of them, are more than just hockey players. They are husbands, fathers, brothers, uncles, sons. I don’t particularly like Evander Kane as a player, but my heart broke for him when he made it known publicly that he and his wife had lost their daughter.
The same with Erik Karlsson and Jordan Staal when they shared their grief at losing children. I despise the Rangers, but I felt deeply for Henrik Lundqvist as he teared up after his good friend Mats Zuccarello was traded away.
Perhaps social media has helped to cultivate this change in how I view hockey players. I am sure players have suffered losses in years prior but did not have the means to share the losses so publicly. Perhaps it was the coldness of the statement that the Nashville Predators had ‘acquired’ Wayne Simmonds from the Philadelphia Flyers that got under my skin.
How do you ACQUIRE another human being? It seems so much like human trafficking to me now, as the memory of tears in Wayne Simmonds’ eyes as he boarded a plane to Nashville burns in my heart. I felt a strange need to apologize to Jeff Carter, whom I mocked for crying after the Flyers traded him to Columbus. I get it now, Cartsy, I get it.