The Eagles’ best-case scenario, John Tortorella’s reality check for Flyers fans, and other thoughts

First and final thoughts …

The Eagles are in a bad way. Everyone knows this. They’ve lost three games in a row. They’ve handed home-field advantage in the NFC to the 49ers. Their offense has stagnated. They demoted their defensive coordinator. Some of their players have been sniping on social media. They’re dead. Right?

Well, look who knows so much! It just so happens that the Eagles are only mostly dead. And when it comes to the NFL playoffs, there’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is still slightly alive, so let’s take a quick inventory of the reasons to believe they’re still capable of a (minor) miracle.

It’s not as if the Eagles’ players don’t know that they’ve played poorly lately. The offense’s problems aren’t all on Brian Johnson (though a lot of them are). The defense’s problems weren’t all on Sean Desai (though a lot of them were).

“[Crap] going on that we’ve got to get taken care of, man,” linebacker Haason Reddick said Thursday. “Whether it be coaches, players, whatever’s going on, everybody’s just got to look at yourself. Let’s be real: Nobody’s been doing enough for us to win these games. We haven’t been playing sound football as a collective.

“On certain plays, you’ve just got a guy out of position. There’s a chink in the armor. It’s about everybody being detailed in their job from here on out and getting the clarity and confirmation of what their job is and going out on the field and doing it.”

If this recent stretch can’t inspire the Eagles’ best and most important players to sharpen their play, this was never the team everyone thought it was or would be.

— The Eagles’ final three regular-season games are against the Giants (twice) and the Cardinals, and those are two pretty terrible NFL teams. It’s reasonable to project the Eagles winning three times, finishing 13-4, and securing the No. 2 seed in the conference. Nothing is guaranteed, not after what we’ve seen from them lately, but it’s more than plausible.

— Assume for the sake of this exercise that the Eagles do run the table against the Giants and Cardinals. Based on the NFC standings as of Friday, they would host, and probably be favored against, either the Seahawks or the Vikings in the wild-card round. Since the Lions, the NFC South champ, and the Cowboys are likely to end up as the No. 3-5 seeds, and since the Cowboys are better than whatever team might come out of the NFC South, the divisional round could look like this:

No. 5 Cowboys at No. 1 49ers

No. 3 Lions at No. 2 Eagles

Or, it could look like this:

No. 6 seed at No. 1 49ers

No. 5 Cowboys at No. 2 Eagles

That first scenario is the best-case one for the Eagles, obviously. Again, nothing here is assured, but it’s hardly crazy to foresee the Eagles straightening themselves out a bit, winning two playoff games at Lincoln Financial Field, and heading to Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif., on Jan. 28 for the NFC championship game.

Of course, if they lose even once over the next three weeks, it’ll be time to go through their pockets and look for loose change.

» READ MORE: Inside the Eagles: Jalen Hurts’ regression among four big-picture issues with the Birds

Ahead of their game Thursday night against the Nashville Predators, the Flyers had been as good this month as the Eagles had been bad. They had earned at least a point in each of their previous nine games, winning eight of them, vaulting themselves into second place in the Metropolitan Division. Then the Predators beat them, 4-2, and John Tortorella gave everyone a much-needed reality check.

“This team is going to have to forecheck,” he told reporters. “When this league gets going at the end of Christmas and after the holiday, that’s when the grind starts coming in. If we think we’re going to be this high-flying transition team, spreading and stretching and not forechecking, we’re in for a rude awakening.”

It’s rare that an NHL head coach would do what Tortorella did there. He acknowledged what everyone knows to be true: that the league’s 32 teams don’t start really turning up the effort until after Jan. 1, that those teams and players will hit a lull in February, and that they’ll crank it up again come March with the playoffs on the horizon.

That’s why Flyers general manager Danny Briere and president Keith Jones have said that they’re not interested in making a trade to improve the roster in the here and now. That’s why the idea that the Flyers would go after Johnny Gaudreau or any other star languishing in a less-than-ideal situation is silly. That’s why everyone who follows the Flyers should keep the team’s recent hot streak and relative success this season in perspective. They’ll play hard. They’ll hang around. But they still don’t have enough of the kind of high-quality talent that makes a club a true contender, and Briere and Jones aren’t going to derail this rebuild by trying to acquire it anytime soon.

There is nothing wrong with enjoying Joel Embiid’s remarkable play over his first 24 games and looking forward to what he might yet accomplish this season.

There is also nothing wrong with expecting or even demanding that he replicate, or at least approximate, that same excellence in the 2024 postseason — and judging him accordingly if he doesn’t.

» READ MORE: The Sixers need Tobias Harris to emerge again as a scorer for long-term success