Flyers in Texas for big matinee facing Stars

The Philadelphia Flyers continue their disastrous road trip in Dallas taking on the Stars.

The Philadelphia Flyers are not having fun right now. They have only earned two points since the early part of this month and continue this downward spiral that will only end in misery. As we all watch them do this fall and refresh our mock drafts and prospect rankings for this June, the Flyers just have to press on and keep playing the hockey games that are before them.

The attention has now shifted south. The Flyers are visiting the Dallas Stars in the middle of this rough road trip and we’re not sure what to expect. Well, we probably know what result to expect but what else?

The Game

When: 2:00 p.m. ET
Where: American Airlines Center
How to watch: NBCSP, ESPN+

Storylines to watch

Will the offensive momentum continue?

It shocked all of us. In the dying moments of the game against the Washington Capitlas, the Flyers somehow looked like a decent hockey team and revitalized some parts of their offense who was as cold as could be. So, how can this carry over and will it?

It would almost certainly take some heavy lifting from someone like a Travis Konecny or Matvei Michkov — two players who have not been their active selves during this rough stretch of play for this team. We don’t necessarily know if there have been tactical changes to pump some more juice into this offense and maybe be more aggressive on the other side of the puck, but right now everything feels like the Flyers are just trying to not lose hockey games. And they are of course failing.

Stars preying on the lower level

The Dallas Stars have been a mixed bag recently. With their most recent losses happening against the Edmonton Oilers, Winnipeg Jets, Tampa Bay Lightning and Colorado Avalanche — and then the wins sprinkled in between those featuring victories over the likes of the Anaheim Ducks, the Vancouver Canucks, and Calgary Flames; the results feel telling.

The Stars can do it all against weaker competition and then fall to the teams that actually have ambitions to the win the Stanley Cup. Who knows if this means anything for the spring, but with the Stars’ blue line looking like that and not being able to outscore those problems, it certainly makes sense that the results would be this split.

The Flyers fall right into that vulnerable pit of a bad team, so this could get ugly.

The ultimate struggle to seek for relevance

Just 12 more games. Twelve hours of hockey we have to sit through as the Flyers just toy around with being a bad hockey team. Unless some young prospects come up to make debuts or return from juniors — looking at you, Nikita Grebenkin and/or Jett Luchanko — it is difficult to fathom that any of these games are going to be overall interesting.

What is there to gather from these games? Will the lineup to start next season even look similar to this one? There’s the overall struggle to try and look for hooks that can grab you into a hockey game. Usually it’s easy for the Flyers to do that to a person, but for some reason this afternoon game against the Stars is lacking something gripping. Good team hosts bad team, wonder what will happen.

Projected lineups

Philadelphia Flyers

Tyson Foerster — Noah Cates — Bobby Brink
Olle Lycksell — Sean Couturier — Travis Konecny
Owen Tippett — Ryan Poehling — Matvei Michkov
Nic Deslauriers — Rodrigo Abols — Jakob Pelletier

Cam York — Travis Sanheim
Nick Seeler — Jamie Drysdale
Emil Andrae — Egor Zamula

Ivan Fedotov
(Sam Ersson)

Dallas Stars

Jason Robertson — Roope Hintz — Mikko Rantanen
Mason Marchment — Matt Duchene — Mikael Granlund
Jamie Benn — Wyatt Johnston — Evgeni Dadonov
Oskar Back — Sam Steel — Colin Blackwell

Thomas Harley — Ilya Lyubushkin
Esa Lindell — Cody Ceci
Lian Bichsel — Matt Dumba

Jake Oettinger
(Casey DeSmith)