Flyers one point away from a positive holiday trip

The holidays are not always merry and bright, especially for the Flyers.

With Disney on Ice temporarily taking over their rink each year, the Flyers have to pack their bags for an extended road trip around the holidays. They have been making the trip since the 1979-80 season, and in past years, the journey has often meant a weak ending to the year and a rough start to the new one. But the Flyers have the chance to break from the pattern when they play the Anaheim Ducks on Tuesday.

If the Flyers beat the Ducks, they will walk away with five of eight possible points during the four-game road trip. If they take the Ducks to overtime, they will finish the trip with a points percentage of .500.

The Flyers have not finished the holiday road trip, which they define as “any stretch of consecutive road games between the dates of Dec. 19 and Jan. 7,” with a .500 points percentage since the 2014-15 season, when they went 3-4-1. They haven’t finished with a winning record since 2013-14, when they went 5-1.

While the Flyers had winning records on the road trip from 2007-08 to 2013-14, in the last five seasons (they didn’t make the trip in 2020-21), they have lost and often lost badly.

In two of those five trips, the Flyers returned home without a win, and in one of those, they finished without a single point. In the other three seasons, they won just won game.

In 2019-20, the Flyers went 1-4-1 on the holiday trip, getting outscored by 28-16. The year before that, the four road-trip losses sparked an eight-game losing streak.

So a point or two against the Ducks would be a big change of pace, and it would come at an important time for the team.

» READ MORE: Kings crush the Flyers, 6-3, ending their seven-game point streak

With an interim coach who is just 10 games into his tenure, the organization is looking for a new identity. It already had a statement road win under Mike Yeo when it beat the Vegas Golden Knights. That sparked a seven-game points streak, although those seven games still demonstrated a need for improvement.

The Flyers snapped the points streak Saturday in a 6-3 loss to the Los Angeles Kings, and they fell to 1-1-1 on the trip.

“The way I see it, obviously that next game’s a very important game for us,” Yeo said. “If we can get that game, then I would consider this a pretty decent trip.”

While Saturday’s result was worse than the two other games of the trip, Yeo and his players all felt it had a lot of positives for them to build on. After getting severely outshot by the Seattle Kraken and the San Jose Sharks, the Flyers demonstrated a shoot-first mentality against the Kings and had good offensive zone possessions. They created better opportunities on their power plays and scored on one of them.

The Flyers are also drawing encouragement from the news that starting goalie Carter Hart, as well as Scott Laughton and Derick Brassard, are out of COVID-19 protocols and will be joining them in California on Sunday.

“Anaheim’s a really good team,” Joel Farabee said. “We’ve got some guys meeting us there. Hopefully, they’ll bring some energy. And if we get the two points there, we’ll be feeling pretty good coming off this trip.”

Confidence will be needed once the Flyers return home because their schedule is filled with tough opponents such as the Carolina Hurricanes and New York Rangers, who are some of the hottest teams in the division, and their rivals the Pittsburgh Penguins, who beat them at their first meeting.

The Flyers are also chasing a wild-card spot, not just a good record for their holiday road trip, and they’re clawing their way back up the standings after a 10-game losing streak. They’re in 10th place in the conference with 32 points.

With so many games postponed because of COVID-19, teams have played as few as 27 games and as many as 34 (the Flyers have played 32). The Flyers are wedged between the Detroit Red Wings (33 points, 33 games) and the Columbus Blue Jackets (31 points, 30 games).