Remembering Flyers’ Best Playoff Run Without Cup

The Athletic wrote a fun story that carried this headline: “Remembering your NHL team’s greatest playoff run that didn’t end with a Stanley Cup.”

Author Sean McIndoe went through all 32 teams. For the Philadelphia Flyers, he picked 1987. I agree. I think the ’87 team was the best Flyers club that did not win the Cup. Philadelphia lost to Edmonton in seven games in the finals.

Flyers forward Tim Kerr, a 58-goal scorer in the regular season, only played 12 of 26 playoff games that season because of a shoulder injury that prevented him from playing in the semifinals against the Canadiens and the finals against the Oilers.

Kerr was literally an immovable object from in front of the net. He was a power-play specialist, with 26 goals scored with the man advantage. Think he might have mattered against the Oilers? And without their leading scorer, the Flyers took the Edmonton dynasty to seven games.

The Flyers rallied from 2-0 and 3-1 series deficits to win Game 5 in Edmonton, then J.J. Daigneault’s Spectrum-shaking goal won Game 6 — one of the top 10 goals in Flyers’ history.

The Oilers had won Cups in 1984 and 1985. They were the NHL’s best team with in-their-prime Wayne Gretzky, Mark Messier, Jari Kurri and Paul Coffey.

McIndoe wrote:

“The Flyers are weird. They give us a half-dozen trips to the final since their last Cup win, plus four more trips to the conference finals, and all of them seem to end with everyone being really mad.

“We can obviously write off options like 1976, 1997 and 2000. I think there’s a solid case for 2010 when they were a No. 7 seed that pulled off two big upsets, then somehow had home ice in the conference finals before losing to the Hawks in the Final.

“But let’s go with 1987, if only because that team was off the rails in a way that feels very Flyers. You had Ron Hextall, Mike Keenan, the wild brawl with the Habs, a record 26 playoff games in all, and a finish that saw them become the only team to ever make Gretzky’s Oilers sweat in a final.”

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