Given the Flyers’ tortured history, this would be the perfect year for them to win the Stanley Cup | Mike Sielski

It has been more than 18 years since the moment that it became fair and natural to ask: How many ways can the Flyers not win the Stanley Cup? When exactly was that moment? Probably sometime after the goaltender started screaming at his teammates and those teammates started firing pucks at his head in retaliation.

This was the spring of 2002, and the Flyers were 27 years into what is now a 45-year run of championship-lessness, and though it felt like they had already exhausted every possible reason or excuse for falling short, Roman Cechmanek was happy to crank up the absurdity knob to 11. He had posted a .921 save percentage in the 2001-02 regular season as the Flyers won their division and earned the No. 2 seed in the Eastern Conference. But in the midst of a team-wide meltdown during a first-round playoff series, the notoriously squirrelly Cechmanek allowed a goal to the Ottawa Senators, skated toward the Flyers’ bench, and yelled at the coaches and players there.

The catalyst for his hissy fit was never fully explained. Maybe, with the Flyers heading to a humiliating five-game loss, he wanted to be pulled. Maybe he was angry at the lack of offensive support; the Flyers scored just two goals in the entire series. Whatever the case, he was ducking rubber the following day, thanks to his teed-off teammates – the incident just a prelude to a full-fledged locker-room mutiny that led to the firing of head coach Bill Barber.

Compared with Cechmanek and the multi-barreled embarrassment of ’02, the prospect of the Flyers’ missing out on a chance to win a Cup this year because of a pandemic seems only so strange.

When the coronavirus outbreak stopped the NHL season cold on March 12, the Flyers were in a position that was at once brand new and familiar to them. They were good, genuinely so – not a group of overachievers, not a club that had to sweat blood to win every night, but a strong and complete team that could beat any opponent. They hadn’t been such a team since 2012, and it had taken a lot of re’s – rethinking, restarting, rebuilding over several years – to become one again.

They were the kind of team they used to be all the time, really. Hovering near the top of the Eastern Conference through four-fifths of a regular season would have been nothing out of the ordinary for the Flyers for, say, the 35 years after they last won the Stanley Cup, in 1975. Ed Snider prided himself on making sure that the Flyers were contenders every year, and if they weren’t, it wasn’t for his and his franchise’s lack of trading and signing and trying.

One might have thought that, over all those years, the Flyers would have won a Cup just because the odds suggested that they would, that they couldn’t keep throwing themselves against that locked door without the hinges giving way at some point. Except the door stayed shut. They peaked as a franchise on Jan. 11, 1976, when they beat the Soviet Red Army at the Spectrum, establishing themselves as the world’s best hockey team. Four months later, their dynasty was ending, and another was beginning: The Canadiens swept them in the Final, the first of four straight Stanley Cups for Montreal.

Similar scenarios kept playing out. The Flyers kept running into dynasties. After going 35 games without a loss in 1979-80, they fell in the Final again, this time in six games to Bob Nystrom, the New York Islanders, and Leon Stickle. Then came Wayne Gretzky, Mark Messier, and the Edmonton Oilers of the mid-1980s, and had Pelle Lindbergh not gotten behind the wheel of his cherry-red Porsche on the night of Nov. 11, 1985, the Flyers might have overcome Edmonton’s greatness. As it was, with Ron Hextall in net, they took the ’86-87 Oilers to Game 7, only to score first for the only time in that memorable series, only to lose anyway.

To that point, the Flyers could reasonably argue that bad luck and unfavorable circumstances had prevented them from winning another championship. They could even lump their 1995 conference-finals loss in that category, as it came against another club that was just beginning a lengthy stretch of excellence: the New Jersey Devils. But over time, they became their own worst enemy.

The following year, they lost a second-round series to a lesser team, the Florida Panthers. The year after that, they reached the Final, where an infamous “choking situation” developed against the Detroit Red Wings. The year after that, they hired Wayne Cashman as their head coach. For years after that, they couldn’t find the right goaltender, couldn’t make the right trade, couldn’t sign the right free agent: Chris Gratton, Peter Forsberg, Vinny Lecavalier, one space cadet in Cechmanek, another, more expensive one in Ilya Bryzgalov.

In 2000, they squandered a three-games-to-one lead over the Devils in the conference finals, when Eric Lindros’ return to the lineup – and his subsequent bug-like squashing at the elbow and shoulder of Scott Stevens – drained the Flyers’ mojo. In 2004, they ran out of gas (and defensemen) against the Tampa Bay Lightning. In 2008, they reached the conference finals again, and Sidney Crosby and the Pittsburgh Penguins wiped them out. In 2010, they made that remarkable charge to the Cup Final against the Chicago Blackhawks, then had Michael Leighton remember that he was Michael Leighton. They tried three goalies in the 2011 playoffs, and that didn’t work, either.

They had chased a championship for so long and with such intensity and desperation that they could no longer tell the difference between the Stanley Cup and their tail.

That’s a hard and heavy and sometimes-bonkers history. And if the NHL manages to hold its 24-team playoff tournament this summer and if the Flyers – with their best team in a decade – bow out of it early, the high hopes and low result would be a fitting continuation of that history. But now, consider the opposite. Consider the notion that Sean Couturier and Claude Giroux and Kevin Hayes and Carter Hart and the rest of the team come back from their sabbaticals and perform just as well as they did back in February and March. After all that failure and bad fortune and utter craziness, wouldn’t it be, in some cosmic sense, fair and just for the Flyers to win a Stanley Cup this year, of all years?