The Philadelphia Flyers storybook 2023-24 campaign has come crashing down after a late-season losing streak has pushed them out of the playoff picture, and it has left everyone scrambling for answers at to where the problems stemmed from. And while the answer is essentially that the entire puzzle went to pieces at the same time, the goaltending has been a major cause for the team’s struggles.
The fans have gotten their pitchforks and torches ready and deemed 24-year-old NHL rookie Sam Ersson fully liable for the tailspin the Flyers have taken on, but is it really his fault?
Tortorella mentioned in one of his pressers that the team was expecting Carter Hart to go away and that he had penciled Ersson in for 18-22 starts when the season began. Hart played a vast majority of the games for the first few months of the season before December rolled around and a much more even split took place before Hart’s departure in mid-January.
Now, 18-22 starts for Ersson seems like a fairly low projection even if Hart made it through the season, given the latter’s career high is only 55 games played. But the intent was seemingly there from the organization to work Ersson in to the league rather than throw him directly into the deep end and it’s not necessarily their fault for the way things went down.
Fast forward to April and Sam Ersson has now suited up for 48 games during the 2023-24 season and will see at least one or two of the remaining three contests. He’s sporting a 2.96 goals against average and .886 save percentage. And if we’re being honest, both those numbers are much less ugly than expected to be before looking it up.
Though it is a fact that Ersson’s best stretch of the season came from late November to mid-January when he was playing once every 7-10 days. He posted 11 wins, two shutouts and a save percentage well above .900 in 15 games from November 10 to January 18.
He’s managed just nine wins in 29 games since Hart’s arrest and he (along with Cal Petersen, Felix Sandstrom and Ivan Fedotov) have the worst collective save percentage in the league in that time.
The problem is, a late season collapse isn’t a new story for Ersson; he had a similar trend towards the end of last season with the Phantoms as well.
Ersson played 42 games in Lehigh Valley in 2022-23. He was near bulletproof through December and January but became less reliable as the season went on and posted a sub-.900 save percentage in 11 of his final 17 games from mid-February on.
Those struggled could be chalked up to exhaustion, as he returned from hip surgery that limited him to just five games in 2021-22, so the lack of conditioning should not have come as a major surprise. But now that he has seemingly ran out of energy from the starting role once again, one has to wonder if he is capable of seeing the lion’s share of ice time in a season.
Ersson could be a guy who just excels in a backup role, but just doesn’t have the stamina to hold down the fort as a bona fide top guy capable of 50-plus starts a season. And there’s nothing wrong with that. The NHL has been shifting towards a 1A/1B goaltending tandem for many years. There are very few exceptions in the league today of goalies even playing 60 games a year. Jusse Saros and Alex Georgiev being the only two to eclipse that mark and Connor Hellebuyck likely to hit it before the end of the season.
With Ivan Fedotov in tow there’s a good chance the Flyers deploy a much more even split in 2024-25, a strategy that should help both players from getting too overwhelmed. Hopefully that’s the key moving forward, because even if the goaltending wasn’t 100% to blame for the collapse the Flyers have endured, they sure had their hand in the cookie jar and bear responsibility for fixing it next season. Somehow.
By: Dan Esche (@DanTheFlyeraFan)
photo credit: nhl.com
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