‘This one hurts’: The Flyers can only think ‘what if’ after falling agonizingly short of the playoffs

It was only fitting that this chaotic Flyers season would have an equally chaotic ending.

The Flyers’ playoff hopes were over before the final buzzer sounded at the Wells Fargo Center on Tuesday, and even before T.J. Oshie’s empty-net goal broke the 1-1 stalemate for the Washington Capitals with three minutes left. Because minutes earlier, across the northern border, David Perron of the Detroit Red Wings had buried a point shot with three seconds remaining to tie the Montreal Canadiens and secure his team at least a point, mathematically eliminating the Flyers from playoff contention.

“We gave it a shot,” goaltender Sam Ersson said afterward. “We did everything we could to push for the playoffs.”

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Since the Flyers needed a regulation win against Washington — in addition to a Red Wings regulation loss — to remain alive past Tuesday, John Tortorella had already pulled Ersson in hopes of breaking the tie, before receiving word of Perron’s goal. Oshie quickly capitalized, and the Flyers finished their season with a 38-33-11 record, sixth in the Metropolitan division.

After safely sitting in playoff position for months, things suddenly seemed lost when the Flyers suffered their longest losing streak of the season at the worst possible time, losing eight straight from the end of March into April. But a 4-1 win against the New York Rangers last week, a team that has since clinched the President’s Trophy as the NHL’s top team, provided a spark of hope. A second win, 1-0 against the New Jersey Devils, kept that spark alive until the final game of the season.

“You never want to go through a streak like that,” Ersson said. “It was tough timing, but you got to battle through it. And I think I tried to take some of that with me as well; you’re going to go through those stretches, and you got to be able to handle it. I think we did as a team come up short, but we still got up. I think we can hold our heads up high.”

Nobody predicted at the beginning of the season that the Flyers would still be playing meaningful hockey late in the third period of Game 82. And a few more bounces in their favor, and the Flyers could be gearing up for more games right now — perhaps if Joel Farabee’s first-period goal had not been nullified by a premature whistle, or maybe if Cayden Primeau, the son of former Flyers captain Keith, had made one more stop for Montreal at the Bell Centre.

“This one hurts,” center Scott Laughton said. “Been in the playoffs all year, get out. It’s tough. It’s a tough pill to swallow. This one’s probably the toughest.”

But that eight-game collapse against mostly teams they were expected to beat — or at least be competitive with — ultimately took the Flyers’ destiny out of their own hands. The Canadiens had delivered two of those eight losses, including a 9-3 thrashing in which Montreal scored the most goals it has all season. So it was kismet that it was the Canadiens’ last-second breakdown against Detroit that finally doomed the Flyers.

“It’s tough to really swallow and accept the fact that we were in such a good position a couple weeks ago,” captain Sean Couturier said. “... For me personally, it’s obviously a little disappointing with the way I played in the second half of the year. It wasn’t good enough. I wish I could have made a bigger difference, but I just got to keep working, learn through it, and bounce back next year.”

The collapse will sting for a while, but it’s how the Flyers found a way to salvage the final three games of the season that several players pointed to as a positive. Veteran blue-liner Erik Johnson, who won the Stanley Cup with the Colorado Avalanche in 2022, compared the stakes against the Capitals to that of a playoff game. Johnson scored the Flyers’ lone goal on Tuesday.

» READ MORE: The Flyers’ collapse probably made their long rebuild longer

“I remember my first few playoff games being pretty nervous and pretty tight. And to go through experiences like that as a young player only makes the trajectory of your career a little bit better, to get used to those games at a younger age,” he said. “You have players on this team that haven’t seen something like this and they go through it like they did, it’s going to help them in the long run.”

Tortorella, who has coached his fair share of playoff games, agreed that games like Tuesday’s are a valuable learning experience. But he also knows the team still has a ways further to go.

“I think if we get to a Game Seven, we’re gonna find out it’s a little bit different,” Tortorella said. “I hope we get that opportunity.”