In a league full of mysteries the Philadelphia Flyers might be the biggest of them all

They are pretty good. They do a lot of things well. But how good are they? It is a tough question to answer, even after half of a season. That might be what the NHL wants.

We are approaching the halfway point of the 2025-26 NHL season and other than maybe five or six teams I am not really sure who is good and who is bad. That seems a little odd to say, because in most sports a half-season sample size should give you at least some idea. But this season? In this NHL? There is still a lot of noise out there. Maybe everybody is somewhere in between good and bad, jumbled into a pile of mediocrity (otherwise affectionately known as parity).

I am confident the Colorado Avalanche are good. Probably great. With only two regulation losses in 38 games, and a 26-2 record in games decided in regulation, that seems like a valid assessment.

I am reasonably confident the Dallas Stars, Minnesota Wild and Carolina Hurricanes are probably really good. They create a nice second-tier in the standings below Colorado, while also distancing themselves from the rest of the pack.

On the other end of the standings, I am reasonably confident that the Vancouver Canucks and Chicago Blackhawks are probably bad. Perhaps very, very bad. The Blackhawks mostly stink, and the Canucks mostly stink and just traded their best player. That is a recipe for major stink.

Everybody else? Just completely thrown into the middle of the pack as an interchangeable pile of question marks.

Who is good? Who is not good? Who knows!

The biggest question-mark for me at this point is the Philadelphia Flyers, and in a lot of ways they are the perfect representation of what the 2025-26 NHL season — and the modern NHL as a whole — has become.

A quick glance at the overall record points to what should be a very good hockey team. After their 6-3 win over the Canucks on Tuesday, they have the sixth-best points percentage in the NHL and the third-best points percentage in the Eastern Conference.

That is good! They are also well-positioned to make the playoffs. They probably will, barring some kind of brutal second-half performance. The playoffs should be the expectation at this point. If they miss at this point, something probably went wrong.

I am just not sure what that means right now given the current NHL landscape and standings.

That landscape has a lot of parity. They are one of the many teams that have some outstanding strengths (their defensive play), and some potentially significant weaknesses (their offensive play). They are not alone in that.

In a league where three-point games are becoming more and more common, the Flyers are also making them a regular occurrence. This team hates winning in regulation and loves overtime. A significant portion of their games have turned into three-point games in the standings, and it is having a profound impact on their overall record and place in the standings.

When it comes to the latter point, roughly 27 percent of the league’s games have gone to overtime this season, which would be the highest mark league-wide since the 2005-06 season. It is a thing.

The Flyers have taken that to an even further extreme so far with 37 percent of their games (14 out of 38) going to overtime, and a whopping 20 percent (eight out of 38) going BEYOND overtime into a shootout.

That is absurd. It is also season-changing.

This is not meant to be overly critical of the Flyers or discredit what they have done. The league is set up the way it is, every team is playing under the same point system, and they have collected points within that system at a rate higher than most teams have, regardless of the manner in which they have done it.

That counts, friends. It still creates some questions.

Let’s talk about all of that as it relates to them, the league and what it might mean for their ceiling this season.