It took 81 games, but the Philadelphia Flyers have clinched a wild card position in the 2016 NHL Stanley Cup playoffs. The Flyers defeated their cross-state rivals, the Pittsburgh Penguins, on Saturday night by a score of 3-1 to clinch their second playoff spot in the past four seasons. The Flyers were truly underdogs heading into the season. Behind the true superstars on the team in Jakub Voracek and Claude Giroux, many of the players were seen as underachievers. The team had also just signed a new head coach in Dave Hakstol and a new general manager in Ron Hextall, so many people believed that this season would be spent acclimating to an entirely new structure. Instead, the team played its heart out and made it to the playoffs.

The success of Philadelphia can be placed on a few factors, but one of the most important was the call-up of rookie defenseman Shayne Gostisbehere from the minors. Gostisbehere has 16 goals and 28 assists in only 62 games this season. Those are fantastic numbers for a defenseman, especially for a rookie. He did not play the whole season, but was brought up from the minors after the Flyers traded defenseman Luke Schenn to the LA Kings. “The Ghost,” as Flyers fans have called Gostisbehere, is a leading candidate for the Calder Trophy, which is the award given to the rookie of the year. He even broke the record for most consecutive games with a point by a rookie defenseman with 15 straight games. Behind players like Gostisbehere and Wayne Simmonds, who scored two goals in the game against the Penguins and broke his personal record for goals in a season with 31, the Flyers were able to prove the skeptics wrong and reach the playoffs after missing out last season.

It was not just up to the Flyers as to whether or not they made it to the playoffs on Saturday. It was a close race between the Detroit Red Wings, the Boston Bruins and the Flyers all the way up until Saturday. Detroit and Boston were sitting at 93 points with one game to go each and the Flyers had 92 points with two games to play. Philadelphia needed at least one of the two teams to lose their last game or else they would need to win their final two games in order to grab the last wild card spot. On Saturday, both the Bruins and the Red Wings lost their games, which meant that all the Flyers needed to do was win either their game against the Penguins on Saturday or their final game of the season against the Islanders on Sunday. The game meant nothing to the Penguins, since they had already clinched the second seed in the Metropolitan division. Pittsburgh rested two of their star players for this game in Sidney Crosby and Kris Letang. The Flyers’ win meant that Detroit grabbed the third and final seed in the Atlantic division and that Boston would sit out the playoffs for the second season in a row. Detroit also reached a significant landmark in making the playoffs. It is the 25th year in a row that the Red Wings have made the playoffs. It is the longest active streak in all-American professional sports. The Flyers will face the Presidents’ Trophy-winning (given to the team with the best regular season record) Washington Capitals in the first round of the playoffs.

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