TL;DR
The Flyers clinched their first playoff berth since 2020 behind Matvei Michkov's breakout performance — a 20-year-old from Chelyabinsk ends six years of Philadelphia hockey heartbreak.
MSM Perspective
NHL.com has the clinching video; Sportsnet and The Score detail Michkov's stat line and the shootout win over Montreal.
X Perspective
Philadelphia is erupting — Michkov jerseys are sold out and the city is doing the math on a Flyers-Penguins first-round rivalry.
Wednesday night at Xfinity Mobile Arena, Matvei Michkov scored, assisted, and made the kind of plays that make a city forgive six years of patience it did not know it had. The Philadelphia Flyers beat the Montreal Canadiens 4-2 to close the regular season, clinching the franchise's first playoff berth since 2020. [1]
Michkov finished with a goal and two assists against Montreal. He is 20 years old, from Chelyabinsk, Russia, and he has spent the last stretch of the regular season making the case that the Flyers' rebuild — the painful, protracted kind that Philadelphia sports fans have come to know intimately — produced something worth the wait. [1] In his last 12 games before Wednesday, he had 12 points. Against the Canadiens, he was the best player on the ice in a game the Flyers needed to win.
The path to the postseason was secured the night before, when the Flyers beat the Carolina Hurricanes 3-2 in a shootout, with goaltender Dan Vladar stopping four consecutive shooters. [2] That result, combined with the final-day win over Montreal, placed Philadelphia in the playoff bracket for the first time in half a decade.
The arithmetic of suffering is always part of Philadelphia sports. The last Flyers playoff run ended in a bubble, the stands empty, during the first summer of the pandemic. What followed was a rebuild that changed the roster, changed the front office, and eventually brought in a 19-year-old Russian winger who had served a one-year mandatory national service obligation before being allowed to come to North America. [1] That winger is now 20. He is also the reason the city is talking about hockey in April.
The NHL playoffs begin April 18. The Flyers' first-round opponent will be the Pittsburgh Penguins — a matchup that does not require historical context to generate electricity in a city where hockey rivalries carry decades of muscle memory. [2]
What Michkov does in a best-of-seven against Pittsburgh will be the most-watched thing in Philadelphia for the next two weeks. He has spent the regular season answering questions about his upside. The playoffs will ask a different kind of question.
-- AMARA OKONKWO, Lagos
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