April 16, 2026
Kyle Ross/Imagn Images
Travis Konecny has waited a long time to bring playoff hockey back to Philly.
Travis Konecny has been around for the past 10 years, and has seen a whole lot happen in Philadelphia, just not for the Flyers.
"I've been through all the Super Bowls and the World Series stuff," Konecny said. "I've seen all this playoff stuff going on around the basketball team, too, like all the playoff stuff, and you want to be part of it. Every single year, you see it."
But for one reason or another, the Flyers haven't for most of it.
But it's their turn now.
Konecny and the Flyers practiced at their training center in Voorhees on Thursday morning in preparation for their first-round playoff series against Sidney Crosby and the rival Penguins, which will officially begin Saturday night with Game 1 in Pittsburgh.
Konecny, now 29, has only ever been to the playoffs twice; in his second season in 2018, when the Claude Giroux-era Flyers fell in the first round to the Penguins in six games, and then in 2020, which was played inside the Toronto COVID bubble in front of no one.
In between was a whole lot of mediocrity.
The Ron Hextall-Dave Hakstol general manager and coach tandem took the team nowhere, the Chuck Fletcher-Alain Vigneault duo that succeeded it worked for that one COVID-impacted season, but then crumbled just as quickly leaving the bubble.
John Tortorella came on board as coach to reset the culture for what was, at that point, a skill-deprived and apathetic team, but it took until Fletcher getting fired and Danny Brière getting installed as the next GM for the organization to actually utter the word "rebuild" and come to grips with the fact that it needed to start thinking for the long haul.
The couple of years that followed were still lean because of it.
Still, Konecny and fellow veteran holdovers Travis Sanheim and Sean Couturier stuck it out.
It was a lot of frustration for Travis Konecny and the Flyers to get here.
They believed in the plan set by Brière, and in a few different spots, each did express that they thought the team might be much closer to breaking out than most from the outside realized.
Hiring Rick Tocchet as the next head coach brought them closer to it. So did Brière's moves to bring in Trevor Zegras, Christian Dvorak, and Dan Vladar over the summer. And before Denver Barkey, Alex Bump, and Porter Martone made their way up to put everything over the edge, while Tyson Foerster made a crucial early return from injury, Konecny was already a lot more vocal about this season's team being ready to make the playoffs now.
"I mean, I think everyone had the same goal," Konecny said. "Rick, from camp, it was something that we had talked about. We know as a team what we have, we know what we're capable of doing, so it was just a matter of putting it all together.
"Guys believed in here the whole year," the veteran winger continued. "We knew it was a possibility, and we didn't shock ourselves when we got in. We kind of proved we knew we were right."
It just took a little longer, and one insane climb back up the standings for it to all fully click.
A shootout win over the Minnesota Wild to take both games in a back-to-back last month was a critical turning point in the Flyers' rally into the playoffs.
The Flyers nearly cost themselves with a tailspin through January and into the Olympic break, but coming back from it in late February onward, they went on an 18-7-1 tear that made up all the ground they needed in the standings.
Then finally, with a drag-out shootout win over the Carolina Hurricanes on Monday night, the Flyers clinched the 3-seed in the Metropolitan Division, all in front of a packed Xfinity Mobile Arena crowd that was roaring and ready to embrace them, along with the rest of the city.
The Phillies felt it in 2022 when they took off on their miracle run to the NL Pennant. The Sixers felt it in 2018, too, when The Process evolved into long-awaited playoff contention. And the Eagles certainly felt it during their underdog run to the Super Bowl in early 2018, and with the next shots that came along in 2023 and 2025.
Now, finally, it's Konecny's turn. It's the Flyers' turn.
They're a part of this.
"I'm just excited," Konecny said. "I think the whole city, it wasn't just us, the whole city was ready to be back in the playoffs...
"And we're ready."
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