Subscribe
Follow Us
For the second straight year, the Philadelphia Flyers have imploded at the end of the season. In 2023-24, Philly occupied a playoff spot before losing nine of 11 games to end the regular-season on the outside looking in. And although the playoff dream is long over in 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 one key factor continuing to hold the team back — goaltending.
“I'm not laying blame, but that goaltending position, we have to fix that,” he said in a recent interview with NBC Sports Philadelphia's Ashlyn Sullivan. “You do not win in this game without good goaltending. It has not been good. I say that and then I come back with, how can we expect it to be good when we have such inexperience at that position?”
The Flyers lost Carter Hart last season, who awaits trial in the Hockey Canada sexual assault case from 2018.
“When Carter left, that threw this into turmoil,” Tortorella said back in January, per Sullivan. “It is what it is, we've lived with it, we continue to live with it and we do the best we can.”
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 only 34 NHL starts.
The Flyers have an NHL-worst .873 save percentage this season. Last year, 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 year, which isn't a recipe for any kind of success. Tortorella admitted coming into the year that the team's goalie situation “scares the crap out of me,” and it looks like those fears were well-founded.
Flyers trying to stay out of Eastern Conference basement
Along with the offense scoring 3.39 goals per game — good for 28th in the National Hockey League — it's not hard to see why the Flyers are one of the worst teams in the Eastern Conference this season.
Although they hung around the playoff picture for a couple different stretches, the recent streak of futility has Philadelphia just three points ahead of the Buffalo Sabres, who are currently in the conference basement. At 28-35-9, it looks like the rebuild is not even close to being over in Pennsylvania.
Considering the Sabres have three games in hand, and have been much better as of late, it wouldn't be surprising if Tortorella's team finished dead last in the conference come mid-April.
With the goalie free agent market not shaping up to be lucrative, the Flyers will have to hope for either internal improvement, or rely on general manager Danny Briere and the front office to make a splash through a trade.
The way 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 try and ice a more competitive roster in 2025-26.
