Flyers prepare for playoff matchup!

The Flyers had a fabulous regular season and hope to finish that successful season with a very sucessful playoffs.

Last season the Flyers went out in 7 games in the eastern conference finals to the stanley cup winning Hurricanes.  They feel that they have learned from their efforts last year and are looking you use that along with added experience from guys like Joe Sakic and Brian Rolston to propell themselves to the Cup.

We really feel like its our turn.  The lightning and ourselves were the toast of the league all year long, and if not for losing Big Joe Sakic for a 3 month stint we feel we would have won the Presidents Trophy.  All that will be forgoten though if the Flyers reach their goal of the Stanley Cup.  We feel we have everything we need to win.  We have an excellent goalie with Giggy in net, and if the worst happens and he gets hurt, we are just as confident with Manny in the net as he's shown all year he is no back-up goalie.  The defence is solid with Federov and Phillips leading the way with Martin and the veteran Hedican playing PP and valuable minutes on the 2nd pairing.  Bryan Allen and Skoula are extremely reliable in our zone and throw a lot of hits and block a lot of shots.  They are our bluecollar guys and i couldn't ask for two better ones, claimed GM Davidson.

The forwards are filled with a balanced scoring attack.  The Flyers leading scorer was Rolston and he plays on the third line!  Of course his linemates Todd White and Trent Hunter know how to also score and are very reliable all over the ice.  The first line boast a playoff master in Joe Sakic.  Joe can turn a game on his own and since his injury has fully healed had been on better than a point a game pace in the past month.  He is lined up with Sturm and Dumont making a very quick line with three guys that can all fire a puck.  Manning the 2nd line is young David Krejci who earned his spot when Sakic went down, Krejci originally was called in to be an emergency replacement and it was assumed that GM Davidson would be making a move for a guy to fill that 2nd line center spot, however with Kejci's play this year he ended up staying on the 2nd line all season while sakic was out and since his return.  He skates alongside Erat and Kobasew making for a young line with the hard working Kobasew digging out pucks, krejci using his playmaking skills to set up plays and Erat finishing off for the goals.  The 4th line is a shutdown line with Belanger centering Perring and Pettinger, Belanger has also had a solid offensive season but his role is for faceoffs and defence first.  Rucinsky is also available for the playoffs and his leadership will be key in the dressingroom as well as he can fill in on any line if an injury should occur and he can fill anyone's spot very well.  Should we need a boost well guys like Lucic and Cajanek would be available from the farm, and Richardson's veteran reliability can be used on defence if we need him.

This Flyers team is focused and ready.  In our last game we rested a few guys and got some of these guys that we may call on in the playoffs into the game against the BRUTAL NY Rangers so they'd be fresh and well we still managed a win.  We always get up for games against these guys and are sad that we won't be facing them till next regular season at some point as they weren't good enough to qualify for post season play.  I wonder if they are as bad at golf as they are at hockey, probably i'm guessing, at least they will have a lot of time to practice.

Anyways the Flyers would like to congratulate those teams that did qualify for the playoffs and we hope that its an exciting playoff with a lot of close matchups and that teams put out their best efforts, but in the end of course we hope to be holding Lord Stanley at the end of it all.

From a very excited City of Philadelphia, this is Meric "Schmeric" Wolfman reporting.