For the second straight 12 months, the Philadelphia Flyers have imploded at the tip of the season. In 2023-24, Philly occupied a playoff spot before losing nine of 11 games to finish the regular-season on the skin looking in. And although the playoff dream is long over within the City of Brotherly Love in 2024-25, the Flyers have lost 10 of their last 11 dating back to March 4.
Head coach John Tortorella pointed to at least one key factor continuing to carry the team back — goaltending.
“I’m not laying blame, but that goaltending position, we now have to repair that,” he said in a recent interview with NBC Sports Philadelphia’s Ashlyn Sullivan. “You don’t win on this game without good goaltending. It has not been good. I say that after which I come back with, how can we expect it to be good when we now have such inexperience at that position?”
The Flyers lost Carter Hart last season, who awaits trial within the Hockey Canada sexual assault case from 2018.
“When Carter left, that threw this into turmoil,” Tortorella said back in January, per Sullivan. “It’s what it’s, we have lived with it, we proceed to live with it and we do one of the best we will.”
In 2024-25, Philly has gone with three goaltenders: Samuel Ersson, Ivan Fedotov and Aleksei Kolosov. It’s Ersson’s first time as a bonafide No. 1 goaltender, while Fedotov and Kolosov have combined for less than 34 NHL starts.
The Flyers have an NHL-worst .873 save percentage this season. Last 12 months, it was tied with the Ottawa Senators at .884 — also, the league’s worst.
All three of the netminders have an under .900 save percentage this 12 months, which is not a recipe for any form of success. Tortorella admitted coming into the 12 months that the team’s goalie situation “scares the crap out of me,” and it looks like those fears were well-founded.
Flyers attempting to stay out of Eastern Conference basement
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Together with the offense scoring 3.39 goals per game — good for twenty eighth within the National Hockey League — it is not hard to see why the Flyers are one among the worst teams within the Eastern Conference this season.
Although they hung across the playoff picture for a pair different stretches, the recent streak of futility has Philadelphia just three points ahead of the Buffalo Sabres, who’re currently within the conference basement. At 28-35-9, it looks just like the rebuild is just not even near being over in Pennsylvania.
Considering the Sabres have three games in hand, and have been a lot better as of late, it would not be surprising if Tortorella’s team finished dead last within the conference come mid-April.
With the goalie free agent market not shaping as much as be lucrative, the Flyers could have to hope for either internal improvement, or depend on general manager Danny Briere and the front office to make a splash through a trade.
The way in which the squad has played, it’s clear that various places need improvement — and there doesn’t look to be any easy fix. It’ll be interesting to see what management does over the summer to attempt to ice a more competitive roster in 2025-26.
