The Philadelphia Flyers Lead The League In Having Balls
Joe Sargent. Getty Images.Some teams have superstar talent who can score at will on any given night. Some teams have defensemen who instill the fear of god into their opponent every time they come across the blueline with the puck on their stick. Other teams have goalies who can make their opponent feel like the net is is somehow half its normal size.
But if you want to win in the National Hockey League, it takes more than just skill. It takes a big ol' set of nuts. And there might not be a team in the league with more testicles than the Philadelphia Flyers.
The guys might be dumb as shit. Half of them might not even be able to tie their own skates before games. But when they reach down between their legs and give a quick squeeze, they have all of the balls.
I feel like that's the highest praise that any John Tortorella coached team could receive. He'd rather have 23 dudes on a team who have balls than 23 guys who could skate through an entire team and put the puck in the back of the net every shift. You could lose a game by 8, but as long as Torts says that you guys have balls then at least you know you're not getting skated into the ground at the next practice. You can make all the idiotic decisions and plays you want, just as long as you have balls. Because theoretically, it should be a lot easier to coach those mistakes out of players than to coach balls into one.
And there's going to come a time when the Flyers have that superstar talent in the building. We're just a few years away from Matvei Michkov and Cutter Gauthier both wearing orange and black. But none of that talent means anything without the balls to go along with it. And Torts is here to make sure the Flyers have a heavy set of nuts ingrained into the team's culture before anything else.