PHILADELPHIA — Everybody knows the trouble the Flyers have seen. It has been more than five years since they qualified for the playoffs. It has been more than 13 years since they won a postseason series that wasn’t contested in a pandemic-necessitated bubble. It has been more than 15 years since they advanced beyond the postseason’s second round.

Those spare facts speak to just how lousy the Flyers have been and how long they’ve been that lousy. But there’s another, more individualized way to quantify their period of irrelevance. They have had just two players win major NHL awards in the last 24 years: Oskar Lindblom, who was the 2021 Bill Masterton Award recipient for dedication to hockey, and Sean Couturier, who was the 2020 Selke Trophy winner as the league’s best defensive forward. They have had just one player, Claude Giroux, surpass 100 points in a season in the last 29 years. They have had no players win either the Hart Memorial Trophy, for the league’s most valuable player, or the Vezina Trophy, for the league’s best goaltender, in the last three decades.

Put simply, the Flyers haven’t given anyone anything to talk about in a generation. They’ve been bad, and they’ve been boring. As accomplished as Giroux was during his career here, the Flyers haven’t had a player since Eric Lindros who, by his sheer presence and talent, thrust the franchise into conversations and spaces beyond those among its most loyal fans. That trend has a chance to reverse itself, though. It might already be starting to reverse itself, and the Flyers know it. Or at least believe it.

Dan Hilferty, the franchise’s governor, said during a media availability Tuesday that the Flyers have had a season-ticket renewal rate of 90% for the second straight year. “We’ve already sold the end-of-year number that we had last season,” Hilferty said. “Since 2018, this is the first sustainable growth we’ve seen in season tickets.”

As with most things, there is more than reason for that upswing. Through the player-personnel moves they have made, their insistence that they will go about things “the right way,” and their affability when they have spoken publicly, Hilferty, team president Keith Jones, and general manager Danny Brière have cultivated an impression that they are turning the Flyers around. They may very well be. We’ll see. But there’s no doubt that, in the main, longtime fans feel better about the team’s direction than they did when the Flyers were trading draft picks for Tony DeAngelo and signing Keith Yandle. The team has gotten younger and faster and added more skill, and people are optimistic that the Flyers will win more frequently than they did last season — and that, even if they don’t, they’ll be more fun to watch.

The primary reason for that renewed interest and optimism, though, is pretty obvious: Matvei Michkov. It’s not just that Michkov had a terrific rookie season, scoring 26 goals and putting up 67 points in 80 games, all before his 21st birthday. It’s that Michkov’s play-making ability, his shot, his melding of grace and strength on the ice are obvious even to a hockey lay person. What’s more, Michkov’s origin story, so to speak, is attractive and compelling: Here was a prospect whom the Flyers drafted on the hope — not the guarantee, but the hope — that he would get out of his contract with a Russian professional club and join them inside of three years. Instead, he made his debut with the Flyers just 16 months after they picked him, and there has been no public indication so far that he has done anything but impress everyone within the organization.

“He embraces trying to be the best,” Jones said. “It’s an interesting thing to watch him operate. We’re really excited, obviously, that he’s here. He’s going into year two, so that’s always a challenge for young players who got their first taste of the National Hockey League. He is a driven type of personality who wants to be a star in this league.”

A home-grown star. That’s the vital part here for the Flyers. Jones made a fascinating admission Tuesday, acknowledging that in the early and mid 2000s, just before and after the NHL implemented its salary cap, the Flyers would sometimes acquire a big-name player — an aging big-name player — for the sake of maintaining the interest of their fans. Jeremy Roenick, who was 31 when the Flyers signed him in 2001, and Peter Forsberg, who had just turned 32 when the Flyers signed him in 2005, were the examples Jones cited.

“Obviously, you can’t do that anymore,” Jones said. “You have to develop your stars or get very fortunate that a free agent gets to free agency in this game, which is becoming more difficult. So yeah, to have somebody like Matvei to continue to push and hopefully become a superstar for us is very exciting. … The more of those players you have, the more interest that there is. Stars do sell in Philadelphia.”

Saquon Barkley, Bryce Harper, Kyle Schwarber, Jalen Hurts, A.J. Brown, Tyrese Maxey: The other teams in town have that kind of athlete. The kind whose name is familiar to grandmoms and theater kids and everyone in between. This is hockey. This is the NHL. This is the league with the smallest audience of the four major pro sports in North America. Matvei Michkov probably won’t reach their level. But for the Flyers, he has a good shot to get close enough.

____

©2025 The Philadelphia Inquirer. Visit inquirer.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.