Fun Fact: You Are Going To Get Your Ass Kicked If You Try To Fight The Philadelphia Flyers This Year
It's been 50 years since the Philadelphia Flyers have won the Stanley Cup. FIFTY GODDAMN YEARS.
I've loved the Flyers for as long as I can remember. Going to games as a baby. Going to the Wives' Carnivals as a kid. Playing Mites on Ice, and thinking it was the coolest experience of my life. I've dreamed about the Flyers winning a Stanley Cup my entire life. And here I am today typing out this blog as a 33-year-old man, and it hasn't happened once. A couple of close calls, but not really. They've never even had a chance to win a game that would have clinched the Cup during my time on Earth.
Sometimes in order to move forward, you have to go back. The only time in the history of the Philadelphia Flyers they were Stanley Cup Champions was during the heyday of the Broad Street Bullies era. The team had gotten the shit kicked out of them in 1969 by the St. Louis Blues. Ed Snider made a promise from that moment forward that the Flyers would never bloodied or bullied again. Out of the ashes of that 1969 season rose the phoenix of the Broad Street Bullies. One of the most feared and violent hockey teams to ever exist, and it resulted in back-to-back Stanley Cups in '74 and '75.
So let's just do the math here real quick. Deciding to just beat the shit out of everybody = 2 Cups in less than 10 years. Not beating the shit out of everybody = 0 Cups in 50 years.
Looks like beating the shit out of everybody is the move. We already know the Flyers have hired local fighters Andre Petroski and Johnny Garbarino to be the official trainers for the Flyers this season. And now we get a chance to see them in action with Oliver Bonk. You don't always want to see a defenseman you drafted in the 1st round spend 5 minutes in the box for fighting. But if Oliver Bonk needs to set the tone out there and carve up somebody's skull with his fists? Well now he knows what he's doing out there once the gloves are dropped. The kid is a point-per-game defenseman in the OHL. Clearly he has some soft, silky hands. That's perfectly fine as long as his knuckles are made of iron.
The Florida Panthers are obviously the standard in the NHL right now. Back-to-back Cups, and they still have pretty much everybody locked up for the future. But you don't have to be better than the Florida Panthers in order to knock them off. All you have to do is just beat the brakes off of the right guys. Have fun trying to win another Cup when Oliver Bonk just sent Matthew Tkachuk, Sam Reinhart, and Aleksander Barkov to the shadow realm.