The Philadelphia Flyers opened their best-of-seven Eastern Conference Quarterfinal series on the road Saturday night against the Pittsburgh Penguins, with Game 1 set for 8:00 p.m. EDT at PPG Paints Arena. The game was televised nationally by and locally on NBCSP.
The matchup revived one of the NHL’s most familiar rivalries. The Flyers and Penguins last met in the playoffs in the 2018 Eastern Conference Quarterfinals, and both clubs arrived at this series after finishing the 2025-26 regular season with 98 points. Pittsburgh took the regulation-wins tiebreaker with 34 to Philadelphia’s 27, giving the Penguins the right to host Game 7 if the series goes the distance.
Both teams also spent the regular season trying to separate from each other and never really did. The clubs split their four-game season series, with each side winning once at home and once in the other team’s building. The Flyers’ two victories both came in shootouts, a reminder of how narrow the margin was between two teams that ended the year dead even in the standings but not built the same way.
Pittsburgh came in as the NHL’s oldest team by average age per roster player, leaning on Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Kris Letang and Erik Karlsson alongside Bryan Rust, a long-tenured winger, and Anthony Mantha, a 2025 veteran free-agent addition. Ben Kindel gave the roster a different look as a teenager. The Flyers were younger and deeper in their early and mid-20s, with 19-year-old Porter Martone part of the mix. Matvei Michkov, 21, led Philadelphia in scoring after the Olympic break.
That contrast ran through the Flyers’ side as well. Sean Couturier remained the longest-tenured veteran among the players mentioned, Travis Konecny led the team in scoring and Travis Sanheim stood as the top defenseman after suiting up for Team Canada in the Olympics and winning the Barry Ashbee Trophy for the fourth time in his career. Dan Vladar, who represented Czechia in the Olympics this year, captured the Bobby Clarke Trophy as the Flyers’ most valuable player during the regular season, while Samuel Ersson finished with a strong run after the Olympic break and ended the campaign on a positive note despite struggling through the first two-thirds of the year.
Vladar was unlikely to be a finalist for the Vezina Trophy, though he may pick up a few voting points in the Vezina and Hart Trophy tabulations. That leaves the Flyers leaning on a goaltending tandem that found its footing late, while the Penguins arrive with a veteran core that has been through this stage many times before.
Pittsburgh’s netminding added another wrinkle. Stuart Skinner brought 50 games of Stanley Cup playoff experience from his time with the Edmonton Oilers, where he won back-to-back Western Conference championships as the club’s primary playoff starter. The Penguins acquired him in a December 2025 trade that sent Tristan Jarry to Edmonton, a move that signaled how much they wanted a steadier playoff option when the bracket tightened.
The history between the clubs only sharpens the frame. Both franchises entered the NHL in 1967, when the league expanded from six to 12 teams, and their playoff meetings have swung back and forth over the years. Philadelphia won in 1989, 1996, 2000 and 2010. Pittsburgh took the series in 2008, 2009 and 2018. Saturday’s opener did not settle any of that history, but it put two familiar rivals back on the same stage with little room left for guessing.
What happens next is straightforward and unforgiving: one team will try to turn that regular-season deadlock into a postseason edge, while the other will try to make its home-ice tiebreaker matter only if the series reaches a Game 7 in Pittsburgh.
