Flyers’ season suddenly facing detrimental adversity

As the franchise famously dubbed the “Broad Street Bullies,” the Flyers no doubt carry a tough personality, but even the team with a mascot named Gritty can only handle so much and continue to perform at a high level. The Flyers will now have to face a brutal test of character and depth in the face of sudden adversity that’s unfolded in the last week.

The Flyers took on the Maple Leafs on December 3rd, a game which would begin the injury barrage for the Flyers as Michael Raffl would suffer a fractured finger, forcing him to leave the game and land on the IR.

On December 7th, Flyer’s Travis Konecny was diagnosed with a concussion after sustaining a hit against the Ottawa Senators. 2 days later, he was officially announced to have landed on the IR for an undisclosed amount of time. It’s especially frustrating losing Konecny, who started the season on fire for the Flyers so far, scoring 11 goals and 17 assists, totaling 28 points in 30 games played.

As back-breaking as Konecny’s departure is, things would somehow get even worse for the Flyers as 23-year-old Oskar Lindblom was initially listed out with an upper body injury. However, the “upper body injury” was revealed to be much more serious on December 13th, as the Flyers announced that Lindblom had been diagnosed with Ewing’s Sarcoma – an extremely rare form of cancer – effectively bringing his season to an end, while putting his career, and unfortunately, potentially his life, in jeopardy. Ewing’s Sarcoma is one of the more rare forms, only being diagnosed in less than 1,000 cases per year. 4 years ago, former hockey player for the Lehigh Valley Phantoms, Logan Pyett, received the same diagnosis. He recovered after missing most of 2 seasons, and he’ll now be rooting for Lindblom’s recovery, hopefully quicker than his own.

The Flyers as a team are now reeling, still in shock of the events of the last 2 weeks. Since that win over Ottawa on December 7th, they’ve lost back-to-back games against the Avalanche and Wild. They’ve had an extremely strong season so far, especially after franchise record success in November. Now they’ll need to find a way to succeed in spite of the adversity.