The Flyers had one more home game, and one more challenge.
Their fate is sealed. It has been for a while now. They're headed for another early summer and with an eye yet again on the draft lottery, but not before they go out standing as tall as they can, regardless of how it impacts those lottery odds.
But the Columbus Blue Jackets, they were coming into the Wells Fargo Center on Tuesday night fighting for their playoff lives. They needed two regulation wins in their last two games to stay alive, and the Flyers knew they were going to be bringing everything they had.
"And, you know, perfect," interim coach Brad Shaw said at the morning skate in Voorhees. "It makes it a way better hockey game, and makes it a way better challenge at a time when things are starting to wane as far as focus and discipline and all that stuff…Okay, we got one more chance to play against a team that's really playing. Let's see what we can do."
The Blue Jackets shut them out, 3-0.
Columbus' Dante Fabbro broke the scoring with a laser through traffic that Sam Ersson couldn't see early into the second period. Then Kent Johnson was left all alone at the right faceoff circle late into the frame to load up another one-time shot that beat the Flyers goaltender, and all after Emil Andrae took an ill-timed interference call along the neutral zone wall to put Columbus on the power play.
Adam Fantilli, just past the 13-minute mark in the third, scored the goal that put it away.
The Flyers had their looks, like when Bobby Brink tapped a bounce that just missed off the post, and when Tyson Foerster was firing away with any open look he had the second the puck hit his stick, but they had no answer for rising Blue Jackets goaltender Jet Greaves, who stopped all 29 Philadelphia the shots while the defense in front of him did their part to keep other threats like Matvei Michkov and Travis Konecny to the outside.
The roster, as it stands approaching the end, had no other way of cutting in.
The final horn sounded, and the Flyers gathered at center ice to salute a sparse crowd as the final home one they'll play in front of for this season.
The fan base at large has witnessed a ton of ups and downs throughout the year and has shared a lot of aggravation, with no shortage of opinions along with them.
At the core of all of it, though, is that Philly does want to see the Flyers succeed. But the realization set in at various, and often painful, points throughout the year that it's going to be a long, long time before they can again.
General manager Danny Brière is still only at the start of rebuilding this team into the contender he one day wants it to be, and now he has to find its next coach this summer, too.
To the Flyers' credit, they have played admirably under Shaw in the eight games since he was handed the reins following John Tortorella's firing, going 5-2-1 with one more game left against the Sabres on Thursday in Buffalo.
And during the final stretch, they have shown that they're at least good enough to outwork, outlast, and in the case of the Rangers, even outshoot teams in the bottom of the standings with them.
But against a team that had its ticket punched like Ottawa already did on Sunday, and then against a team still desperatley holding out theirs like Columbus on Tuesday night, the difference between where they are and how far they have to go was clear once again.
Nick Tricome/PhillyVoice
The Flyers salute the Wells Fargo Center crowd after their final home game for the 2024-25 season, a 3-0 loss to the Columbus Blue Jackets.
Yeah, they do have a couple of pieces now. Michkov moves like a star and has been the best performing Flyers rookie in a long time, and Foerster went on a late surge to become a mid-20s goal scorer with the promise now that he can generate greater, and they have Travis Konecny and Travis Sanheim as the skilled veteran holdovers to see the process through.
But they still need so much more, and for the pieces who are here already to keep growing.
"When you have five or six guys, that's a different animal than when there's two or three guys," Shaw said Tuesday morning in Voorhees as he was talking about Foerster's development. "So I think having better players here helps him."
"Sometimes you stop learning at 22, sometimes you get to 27 and 28, and you're still learning," Shaw continued. "That's the hope with all these guys, that they keep developing. They get a little bit better, little bit better every day, every day, and before you know it, you got four or five fantastic hockey players, and now you're contending and now you're a team that [other teams] are concerned with. That's the goal. We're not quite there yet, obviously."
Not for a while, they won't be.
They're still building toward getting those four, five, six guys, and don't have that picture fully together.
Top center prospect Jett Luchanko might be part of it, and so could Denver Barkey and Oliver Bonk, and college standout Alex Bump, who was a huge part of Western Michigan winning the National Championship and just signed his entry-level contract with the Flyers on Tuesday.
But it is all going to take time to figure out, a long time.
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