After edging the Carolina Hurricanes 3-2 in a shootout last night at Philadelphia's Xfinity Mobile Arena (that building has had more name changes than Madeline Kahn's character in the 1978 movie The Cheap Detective!), the Flyers are in the Stanley Cup playoffs for the first time since the pandemic-shortened 2019-20 season (COVID also truncated the 2020-21 NHL season), meaning that the last time the Flyers made the playoffs in a full, 82-game season was in 2017-18.
The Flyers needed to make a 5-1 run to, quoting those iconic Virginia Slims commercials, get where they got to today; sort of a mini-version of how the Rangers got in at the end of the 1969-70 season: at that time, if two teams' records were identical, game for game, most goals scored was the first tie-breaker, followed by fewest goals allowed — and going into the last day of the 1969-70 regular season (April 5, 1970), the standings in the NHL's Eastern Division looked like this:
A Rangers win coupled with a Canadiens loss would send the Rangers to the playoffs, if they ended up scoring more goals than Montreal — and both of those outcomes were more or less a fait accompli entering the third period. So both teams pulled their goaltenders in an effort to score as many goals as possible.
The Rangers ended up with a 9-5 victory over the Red Wings, while the Canadiens lost to the Black Hawks 10-2, with Chicago scoring five empty-net goals in the last eight minutes.
The following morning, the back page of the New York Daily News summed up the situation perfectly:
WOW! RANGERS IN PLAYOFFS
But the NHL did anything but appreciate the chaos — prompting them to change the tie-breaking procedures that summer, placing the results of the season series between the tied teams in the second spot, after most wins (the NFL would do the same thing with the NFL-AFL merger).
Back to this season's Flyers: with one game remaining (at home against the Canadiens, who are also having their best season in more than a decade), Philadelphia has 96 points (Washington, fourth in the Metropolitan Division, has 93, with both the Flyers and Capitals having only one game remaining). The Flyers also have three 20-goal scorers (which is pretty much the NHL equivalent of a .300 hitter in baseball or a thousand-yard runner or receiver in the NFL) — right wings Owen Tippett and Travis Konecny and center Trevor Zegras) — and head coach Rick Tocchet will be making his third playoff appearance, and first since replacing John Tortorella (nicknamed "The Great Tortellini" on Philadelphia sports talk radio).
One final note: in two past seasons — 1992-93 and 1993-94 — the NHL actually played an 84-game schedule; if they go back to that, every team can play their seven division rivals four times each, the eight teams in the other division within the same conference three times each, with two yearly meetings between teams not in the same conference. So-called exhibition or "preseason" games can always be abolished to cancel out the extra two games (the NBA can do the same thing — and remember that the ABA also played an 84-game regular-season schedule; that league was where Julius Erving, George Gervin, Moses Malone, and Rick Barry, among others, began their careers).
The NBA can even bring back the ABA's red-white-and-blue basketball. Think of it as an awesome way to commemorate the nation's semiquincentennial — that means "250th birthday" (or anniversary)," for those of you in Rio Linda, West Palm Beach, and Staten Island.
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