“Who are the Philadelphia Flyers?”, I hear you say. Duh, only the best hockey team ever!
While I do know that just by writing out the previous sentence you may see me as a boomer, as the youngsters nowadays call us, I can safely say that I am gladly accepting the risk of being called a boomer. I’d usually complain, but today, you won’t be hearing me complain. Today, I wanted to introduce you to the Flyers, if you haven’t heard of them before, and I wanted to do that by writing out a brief history of the team.
They are not a young team – they have been competing since the sixties!
I wanted to open a chapter on my blog about the Flyers with this fact. Philadelphia Flyers are actually a very old professional hockey team – they were founded in 1967 and have been playing the games ever since. Interestingly enough, they actually won the Stanley cup as the NHL expansion team soon after joining the NHL. That’s when they began their success and honestly they are still riding the success wave! What is really important about that win, is that they won as an expansion team, which didn’t happen often – I don’t know if you know, but originally the NHL consisted of only six teams. It was usually one of those six teams that was victorious, it was never the extension team, but Flyers proved everyone wrong with their first Stanley cup win.
The list of their division championship wins and conference championship wins is very long
While I did mention that they got famous because of winning a Stanley cup as an extension, it’s important to know that they maintained their popularity by expanding their list of wins. While they unfortunately have no presidents’ trophy – they have a lot of wins in their division championships and conference championships. Namely, they have 16 wins in the division championships and 8 in the conference championships! Crazy, right?!
The color of their jerseys has stayed the same
When asked what colors he would want for the team’s jerseys, Putnam, the already existing member of the Philadelphia Flyers decided to mix the colors of his alma mater – his home university, the university of Austen in Texas, the orange and white, with the previous Philadelphia’s hockey team jersey colors which were black and orange. As the result, they created a color palette they would always be recognized for, even 60 years after their creation!
They are one of the rare NHL teams that did not have a mascot for a long time
If you have ever watched any sports game in the US, you are aware of how much we love the mascots of our sports teams. Every team has their own, but funnily enough, Philadelphia Flyers didn’t have a mascot for a very long time. While they had a mascot at the beginning of their career, called the Slapshot, it was dropped at the end of their first season. The next time we would see a mascot wearing Philadelphia Flyers colors would be in 2018 – 50 years after the first mascot! The mascot’s name is Gritty, and they yet have to specify what it is supposed to represent, as it’s just been introduced to us as a fluffy, fuzzy creature that wears Philadelphia Flyers’ colors and marches for them.
