The thermometer is hovering around 100, so what better time than to start thinking about ice hockey?<\/p>\n
Yes, the calendar says mid-July but the NHL will be back before you know it.<\/p>\n
The Flyers will start their 59th season on Wednesday, Sept. 30, their earliest opening date ever. That\u2019s because the National Hockey League is going to a new, expanded 84-game schedule, two more than the regular 82 over the past few decades. And that means starting the NHL season about two weeks earlier than usual and finishing up the Stanley Cup in mid-June.<\/p>\n
The Flyers will open at home for the first time since 2022-23 when they face the Pittsburgh Penguins at Xfinity Mobile Arena at 7:30 p.m.<\/p>\n
The Philadelphia\u2019s full schedule will be released later on Thursday.<\/p>\n
The opening game also marks a rematch of the Flyers-Pens first-round series in last year\u2019s Stanley Cup Playoffs and sees the Pens return to Xfinity Mobile Arena for the first time since Game 6 in which defenseman Cam York scored the series-clinching goal in overtime for a 1-0 Flyers victory.<\/p>\n
This is the eighth time the Flyers will host the Penguins in their home opening game and the ninth time they will play their first game of the season (home or away) against Pittsburgh.<\/p>\n
Philadelphia holds a 5-2-0 record in home openers against the Penguins and is 4-3-1-0 in season-opening games versus Pittsburgh. The Flyers have faced Pittsburgh in both their season opener and home opener more often than any other opponent.<\/p>\n
The Flyers are\u00a033-18-5-2 all-time in their home openers.\u00a0The record all-time in season opening games is 29-20-7-2.<\/p>\n
The record longest home winning streak to begin a season spanned eight games in 1986-87, including their longest win streak (home or away) of six games to open a season.<\/p>\n
The Flyers finished the 2025-26 season with a 43-27-12 record (98 points) to earn their first playoff berth in the Stanley Cup Playoffs since 2020 and bring playoff hockey back to Philadelphia for the first time since 2018.They\u00a0defeated Pittsburgh in six games during the first round before falling to the eventual Stanley Cup champion, Carolina Hurricanes, in the second round.<\/p>\n
Wayne Fish is a freelance writer. Follow his coverage at www.flyingfishhockey.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The thermometer is hovering around 100, so what better time than to start thinking about ice hockey? Yes,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":244718,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[4845,73,75,74],"class_list":["post-244717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pittsburgh","tag-philadelphia-flyers","tag-pittsburgh","tag-pittsburgh-headlines","tag-pittsburgh-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244717"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244717\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/244718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}