How Gassing A Few Beers Turned The Philadelphia Flyers' Season Around
The Flyers have managed to do something that only 2 other teams in NHL history have ever done before. After a 2-1 overtime win against the Dallas Stars, the Flyers became the 3rd team in league history to immediately follow up a 10-game losing streak with a 6-game winning streak. So how do you take a team who could do nothing but come up with no ways to lose hockey games and turn them into one of the hottest teams in the NHL? Simple. You grab a few cases of diesels with the boys and you let the booze do the thinking for you.
“We didn’t like the way we were playing as a team, our identity. And we just had 1 or 2 beers and talked about it to see what kind of team we wanted to be”
Claude Giroux, basically:
This is why I love Claude Giroux and hockey players in general. We’re in a world now where fancy stats and schemes are running hockey. The Flyers were on a 10-game losing skid and you figure the Flyers would have to chance up their entire system to climb their way out of that hole that they dug for themselves. And sure, you see a bit of a difference between the way the team plays now as opposed to a couple weeks ago. They’ve changed up to a 1-2-2 neutral zone set up as opposed to going with the 1-3-1. You can tell that they’re focused on getting shots from higher percentage areas. And then, of course, there was the decision to break up the top line and move Wayne Simmonds up with Giroux and Couturier while giving Jake Voracek his own line with Filppula and Raffl. But the biggest difference maker? A few Molsons with the boys.
Some people may think that I’m joking but those people have clearly never been a part of a team before. You lock everybody in a room, turn all of your phones off, throw a few cases in the middle, everybody gets drunk and nobody leaves until you get everything figured out. It may end up dissolving into a giant locker boxing fight club by the end but you always leave that room as a tighter-knit team than before. That’s just guys being dudes. Also–the Flyers got their win streak started in Canada where the legal drinking age is 18-years-old so Patrick, Konecny and Provorov were all good to join in on the boozery.
P.S. – A win against LA tonight will tie the record for longest win streak following a 10-game losing streak. Could the Flyers become one of the best bad teams in NHL history? I friggin’ hope so too, dude.
h/t Sons Of Penn on the video.