Fourth Time's the Charm

Whether or not they win the series, the Flyers have had phenomenal success in Game 4s over the past five seasons. The Flyers have won eight of their past nine Game 4s, including their past five in a row. That's crazy good.

Some highlights (the ones I could find):

2004 Eastern Conference Quarterfinals Game 4 vs. New Jersey



2004 Eastern Conference Finals Game 4 vs. Tampa Bay



2006 Eastern Conference Quarterfinals Game 4 vs. Buffalo



2008 Eastern Conference Quarterfinals Game 4 vs. Washington



2008 Eastern Conference Semifinals Game 4 vs. Montreal



2008 Eastern Conference Finals Game 4 vs. Pittsburgh



Pittsburgh, on the other hand, has lost their last three Game 4s. Unimpressive.

Recap: Flyers are good, Penguins are bad.

Do it to it, boys.

Orange--You Glad?

Today for the first time since May 3rd, 1999, the Flyers will wear orange for a playoff game. This is the first time since April 6th, 1969, that the Flyers will wear orange for a home playoff game.

I apologize for how uninteresting that is, and I apologize to myself for wasting so much time figuring those dates out.

On This Day Last Year...

...The Flyers took their first lead of the playoffs, winning Game 3 against the Capitals 6-3 to go up two games to one in the first round.

One year later, the Flyers go into Pittsburgh looking to take their first lead of the playoffs tonight.

If that doesn't get you excited for this game, you don't have a pulse.

Go Flyers.

The Penguins' Deluded View of History

One of my most prized possessions is a VHS from 1989 called "Never Say Die," which goes into really ridiculous detail on the Flyers' 1988-89 season, including a long
segment about what the team did to kill time while in Winnipeg. Really must see stuff.

But since the video is impossible to find and will likely never make it to YouTube, I had to find an alternate source for clips on the Flyers-Penguins first ever playoff meeting, in 1989. And yes, it really did take 21 years for the cross-state Penguins to face the Flyers in the playoffs even though they joined the league in 1967-68, because the Penguins were just horrendous in the first half of their existence. The flightless birds only won three playoff series in their first twenty-one seasons, whereas the Flyers had won three playoff series in a season five times by the time 1989 rolled around. That had to be pretty embarrassing for not just the Penguins and their fans, but everyone in the league.

So in lieu of Never Say Die, I found a clip on the 'Tube from what appears to be the Penguins equivalent of Never Say Die. Except that unlike Never Say Die, this Penguins video, inexplicably titled "There's a Team in the Building," is completely on crack. There's some bold-faced bias that even a Fox News anchor would have to shake his head at.

If you don't pay really close attention to the narration, you'll assume the Penguins won this series, when in reality they lost it to a pretty mediocre Flyers team that wouldn't make the playoffs again for the next five years.



Did you catch any Flyers wins in there? They mentioned the Flyers winning game two while showing a Penguin scoring and fans in the Igloo applauding. The mention of the Flyers winning Game 4 was made while the Penguins were shown celebrating their Game 3 win. Game 6's mention is a sentence fragment. The Flyers win in Game 7 mentions a more complete thought, but tries to diminish the win by saying the Flyers "stole" it. Takes some balls to say that a team "stole" a game they won 4-1.

I do realize that getting mad at the narration of a VHS from 20 years ago might not be the most relevant way to prepare for the playoffs, but I care not. Let's just hope the Penguins' 2009 VHS is equally dismissive of these upcoming four Flyer wins.

Home Ice Matters. A Lot.

After winning two series as an underdog last season, home ice might not seem that important. But against our first round opponent, the Pittsburgh Penguins, it most certainly does.

Compared the all-time home and road records against the Penguins, and you'll see why.

Home (in Philadelphia) : 89W-24L-8T (78.8 win %)

Away (in Pittsburgh) : 43W-46L-22T (43.3 win %)

That's a HUGE 35.5% difference.

So please, Flyers, get a point against the Blueshirts tonight. It's practically Game 1 of the first round.

How Close We've Come

Brace yourselves, dear readers, because this is probably the best work I've ever done. The Flyers may or may not be hitting their peak as the playoffs approach, but I certainly am.

Now that the Flyers are officially in the playoffs, I figured it's high time to look to the past to try to find the algorithms, decipher the codes of past results to figure out exactly how well the Flyers will do in the playoffs this year.

Looking at data of number of playoff games won, playoff series won, and series played each year didn't yield a whole lot of useful results, because the number of rounds and lengths of series in the playoffs has changed a few times since 1968. So I figured the best way to put every year in historical perspective was to look at how close the Flyers came to winning the number of playoff games necessary to win the cup each year as a percentage.

Here's the graph, you should click on it to see it bigger:
And if you're for some reason dying to see the X and Y flipped, here it is sideways:

So what can we glean from this gold mine of information? Several things:

1. Keeping Momentum is not the Flyers' strong point (What Goes Up Must Come Down Hard). Very rarely have the Flyers followed up success with success (which is different from not improving, see #3). There has only been one stretch in the entire forty season history of the team in which the Flyers were able to put together consecutive seasons of getting 50% or more of the way to the Stanley Cup. That stretch, not surprisingly, was from 1974-76, when the Flyers made the finals three straight seasons. The Flyers have gotten at least 50% of the way to the Stanley Cup (semifinals/Conference Finals) an extremely impressive thirteen times in their forty seasons, almost a third of the time. But only during this one 1974-76 stretch did the Flyers ever manage to put any of those thirteen back to back. This, theoretically, bodes poorly for these 2009 playoffs. But no better time to break the streak than the present.
2. "Back With a Vengeance" is more than just an advertising slogan (What Comes Down Goes Back Up Big). When the Flyers go a season or more without winning a playoff game but then recover, they're at their most dangerous. In 1973, the Flyers followed up not making the playoffs in 1972 by winning a playoff series for the first time. In 1985, the Flyers followed up two first round sweeps in 1983 and 1984 by making the Stanley Cup Finals. In 1995, after missing the playoffs for five straight seasons from 1990 to 1994, the Flyers got back on track by making the conference finals. And in 2008, the Flyers recovered from finishing dead last in the league in 2007 by making the conference finals. This is a team that knows how to bounce back.
   
3. Improvement comes often, rarely stays around. Only three times in their history have the Flyers done better from one year to the next in consecutive seasons. The Flyers improved in both '73 and '74, both '99 and '00, and both '03 and '04. The improvement in 1999 is pretty minor, though, as the Flyers only improved in that they lost their first round series in 1998 in five games, but lost their 1999 first round series in six. I don't think anybody really saw that as a step in the right direction. Never have the Flyers improved three years in a row, though 1973-75 saw the improvement end in '75 only because the Flyers could not have possibly improved on their '74 Cup win--they merely repeated it.
   
4. Three Clearly Defined Eras, and now. The years/stretches when the Flyers won zero playoffs games split the history of the team pretty cleanly into three major eras, which can be accurately referred to as the Clarkeian Era, the Poulinian Era, and the LeClairian era, as those three players' stints with the team match up best with the team's runs of consecutive playoff-winning seasons, even if Poulin and LeClair weren't necessarily the faces of the franchise. The pre-Clarke era didn't see much playoff success, and the Richardsian era is too young as of now to really say much about it. I skipped over the lockout season in doing the line, but if it was there there would be a clearer demarcation between the LeClairian and Richardsian eras (with that odd Forsbergian 2006 season in-between).
   
5. Problems with this method are that it doesn't differentiate between missing the playoffs and getting swept in the first round, and that games won don't always reflect series won. The Flyers got swept in the first round four times, in 1969, 1971, 1983, and 1984. Getting swept in the first round is much better than missing the playoffs, but looks the same on the graph as the disastrous, cellar dwelling seasons of the early 1990s and 2006-2007. As for the second problem, it's best illustrated by the fact that the graph shows the Flyers as closer to winning the Cup in 2000 and 2004 when they lost in Game 7 of the conference finals than it does in 1976, when they got swept in the Stanley Cup finals.

So there you have it. History says that the Flyers will not be able to repeat their conference finals run of last season this year, but I choose to ignore that information. This is the dawning of the Richardsian Era, boys and girls, in which the Flyers improve every year and Stanley Cups will rain onto the streets of Philadelphia like satellites crashing down to earth. You might want to wear a helmet.

No Fly Zone

November 5th, 1988. Ronald Reagan is president, and the nation hadn't even voted on his replacement yet. The Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Zaire, East Germany (and the Berlin Wall), are all in great shape. Barack Obama is 27, and just started law school. Luca Sbisa is not even a sperm yet.

A lot of things have changed since that day, but one thing has stayed the same--the Flyers' luck in Detroit. In seventeen games in Joe Louis Arena, including two in the 1997 Stanley Cup Finals, the Flyers have won exactly zero times. 0-15-2. Bizarre and gross, especially considering that the Flyers have the second best all-time winning percentage of any team in the league.

So what is it about Detroit that makes it such a horrible place for the orange and black?

• Does being in Detroit, the capital of industrial decline, depress the hell out of them? It sure depresses the hell out of Tim Panaccio.
• Is it an allergy to octopus residue?
• Does the Wings' lack of a third color bewilder them?
• Is it their creepy Europhilia? The Red Wings are the only team in the league where North Americans are the minority. For all the "Buy American" stuff the other Detroit industries promote, the Red Wings sure do love the importeds.
• Or does all the weirdness stem from the Flyers' second-most recent win in Detroit, a 1988 game where the Flyers were down 5-1 and came back to win 11-6. That, my friends, is weird.

Whatever the reason may be, I believe I have the antidote. It is, of course, me. The Flyers are 4-0 in their last four games with yours truly in the building, with wins over Washington, Montreal, Pittsburgh, and Washington again. Not too shabby.

Thirty-Three Years Ago Today...

On January 11, 1976, the Soviet Red Army Team played the final game of their tour of the NHL against the two-time defending Stanley Cup champion Broad Street Bullies. Oft described as the only occasion when anyone else in the NHL ever rooted for the Flyers, the game is considered by many Flyers greats (Shero, Clarke) to be the biggest game in Flyers history.

Rather than talk about it myself, I'll just provide a deluge of pics, videos and links (these may be a little repetitive, but they're all pretty awesome).

Soviet anti-Flyers Propaganda

Further Reading:

Flyers Conquer The Red Army (philadelphiaflyers.com)

Flyers versus Red Army (Wikipedia)

Politics Aside, Flyers and Soviets Resume Action Tonight (New York Times)

Bobby Clarke Interview During Intermission (CBC Archives)