The Flyers organization has long tried to appease those longing for the glory days of the Broad Street Bullies, but in this "New Era Of Orange," they're embracing a more evolved style of the most revered iteration of Philadelphia's hockey team.
Fifty years removed from winning their first Stanley Cup, the Philadelphia Flyers are not the Broad Street Bullies of the 1970s.
For fans who have followed the team since those days, and maybe even since the team's inception, this is detrimental to the team's identity. The Bullies have become so intertwined with the Flyers' brand that many people can't—or choose not to—separate the two.
But the reality is that people aren't writing headlines like, as described by Flyers legend Bob "Hound Dog" Kelly, "'The Animals Are Coming To Town,' [and] 'Lock Your Kids In The House'" about the current team. Opposing fans are not hanging likenesses of Travis Konecny when the Flyers enter enemy territory.
But the Flyers are adopting a new identity that is an evolved version of the (pardon the cliche adjectives) "gritty, hard-hitting" style of hockey they have become famous for. It's not so much a rebranding as it is brushing the dust off the old ways and giving them a fresh coat of paint—the heart still beats, but in a different chest.
There are still tough guys with the likes of Nic Deslauriers and Garnet Hathaway, who have consistently been the go-to figures if an opposing player needs some sense (literally) knocked into him. For all intents and purposes, they're the muscle of this current group. It's not exactly the "five or six policemen" that Ed Snider vowed to give his team after a humiliating defeat to the St. Louis Blues in Game Seven of the 1968 playoffs, but it gets the job done.
The cornerstone of this group, though, is that what they might lack in physicality, they make up for in skill and, at the very least, pure peskiness. The Flyers are a team of mainly smaller, but skilled and smart, players. They're thorns in the sides of their opponents; they're experts in the art of getting under other teams' skin. All Konecny has to do to agitate his adversaries is fire off some of his legendary chirps; more recently, all Matvei Michkov has to do to antagonize other teams is exist.
This current Flyers team values creativity, trickiness, and ambition. Michkov and Morgan Frost have incredibly high hockey IQs that allow them to manufacture offensive chances in seconds that other players couldn't dream of if you gave them hours. Cam York and Tyson Foerster won't think twice before shooting at the net like it insulted their mother. Joel Farabee will (and has) attempt a Michigan just because he can.
And that's not to say that these current players can't fight. Team captain Sean Couturier, who is not typically known to throw punches, didn't hesitate to drop the gloves against the Boston Bruins after one of their players tried to goad Michkov into a fight. Just in the most recent game against the Calgary Flames, Foerster came to Jamie Drysdale's defense after a big open-ice hit (and served 17 penalty minutes for it), while Farabee was gearing up for an altercation with Blake Coleman (at Coleman's suggestion) before the Flames forward chickened out and left the ice for a line change instead.
It's the closeness of the locker room and the willingness to embrace the grind of the season with the guy next to you that connects the present team to the past ones. It's the understanding that your teammates aren't just coworkers, but brothers to a certain degree, that is the true core the Flyers identity—whether or not that protectiveness over each other is shown through flying fists.
These Flyers are more identified with a characteristic of the Bullies that was perfectly described by former center Bill Clement, who said, "We lived by a pack mentality, and that's what made us so successful, that bond. When you're really close with with somebody, you're almost blood. You can't tell me that, one person, if they saw somebody trying to take advantage of a loved one, or blood, a brother or sister or whatever, they wouldn't just jump in and do whatever they had to do."
