Flyers '08: Blocking Out The Sun

I guess Suns would be more accurate. As many of you are aware, the NHL is in an overall slump as far as its popularity goes (guess it's time for Mighty Ducks 4!). What the NHL feels it needs it star power baby! We need Gretzky and Lemieux 2! The NHL thinks they have that in Sidney "Sid The Kid" Crosby and Alexander "The Great" Ovechkin. Both of these players are certainly large on talent and have the stats to back it up. The NHL wants them for marketing and they're all you'll hear about on ESPN (for the 5 minutes they devote to hockey each day...NBA loving bastards...). Naturally, my beloved Flyers get to play in the same damn division as Crosby and have to see him playing for the Pittsburgh Penguins 8 times a year and they get to play Ovechkin and the Washington Capitals in the first round of the playoffs!

The announcers focus on Crosby or Ovechkin is sickening. God forbid a Flyer touch a precious hair on either head of these rising stars! "The Flyers are bullies!" they scream. "The Flyers are little more than thugs!" Okay, I'll give you Steve Downie and Riley Cote but that's it! We have some real talent on this team. Mike Richards and Jeff Carter in particular. These guys don't put up the numbers of our young superstars, but they're both extremely talented and Richards is more than twice the leader that either Crosby or Ovechkin will ever be. Philadelphia will love these guys for their tough, solid play, but tough and solid isn't Sportscenter material. Flash and pomp are, and Ovechkin and Crosby (this is directed more towards Crosby) certainly have that.

Don't believe the overhype? Try watching Sportscenter and see how many times they mention the actual teams as opposed to Crosby and Ovechkin. It's an absurd discrepancy. Ovechkin did nothing for 3/4 of Friday night's game, but he gets one nice game winning goal and he is the Hero of the frickin Universe. Ovechkin was completely shut down on Sunday's game, yet he was the announcers could talk about. I guess I should thank them for talking about Mike Richards for two minutes today (who didn't score but had an amazing game as he was all over the ice and was a force to be reckoned with). Ovechkin's goal on Friday was one of the first things shown on Sportscenter on Friday night. Sunday's 2-0 Flyers shutout? Not even mentioned until the end of the hour long show.

The other problem is that the NHL watches the Flyers so much more closely than any other team in the league. Most of that is their historic reputation as a big, bruising team. It's the true that the Flyers have always been tough, and the current team certainly is too, but they don't need to be called for EVERY LITTLE THING THEY DO AGAINST THE PENGUINS AND CAPITALS. This is especially the case for Pittsburgh where Crosby takes more dives than a mob sponsored boxer. But hey, he's got a cool nickname as Sid the Kid and he can score, why should the Flyers, with one of the largest and most loyal fanbases in the NHL, get in the way of that?

It ain't easy bein' Orange and Black.

Pens

If it wasn't for the Philadelphia Flyers, I would currently be going nuts waiting for baseball season. The Eagles are awful and the Sixers in no way interest me. The Flyers, however, are currently in a clusterf- errrrr, logjam for the lead in the Atlantic division. MY favorite part is that they're enemies with most of the NHL. Usually it's just the New York Rangers and New Jersey Devils, but the Pittsburgh Penguins have also long been a yellow and black pain in our asses, just not to that degree. No longer! Yay for rivalries! Last year the Penguins messed us up and beat us in all 8 meetings. The tables are turned this year and they don't like it. The Pens were whining that the Flyers kept playing through the whole game, scoring two more goals despite being up 6-2. I love this quote from Right Winger Mike Knuble:

"This is the NHL, you don't have to have mercy on teams, and they don't have to have mercy on you. . . . I don't know if it's payback, but any doubt you can get in a team's mind about their ability to win games against you and showing other teams that when you put the hammer down it's going to stay down."

I love rivalries. The best part is that it puts us Flyers fans in the position of hating the NHL's golden boy Sidney Crosby. What else could a Philly fan want?