Flyers Lose First Game of 2025 to Golden Knights

That’s not how you want to ring in the new year.

In their first game played in the year 2025, the Flyers fell to the Las Vegas Golden Knights 5-2 in a game that was never close after the first period.

Before the game even began the Flyers were at a disadvantage, as starting goalie Samuel Ersson was declared day to day with a lower-body injury. This is the third extended period Ersson has missed this season with an injury. The Flyers do not yet have a definitive goalie of the future, and while they may currently hope that it will be Ersson if he begins to develop an “injury-prone” status the team may be forced to look somewhere else. This will once again give backup Aleksei Kolosov the opportunity to prove himself as a legitimate NHL starting netminder.

Unfortunately for Kolosov, if he is in fact trying to prove that he is a legitimate starter in this league, this performance does not help his case. He saved 22 of 26 shots but seemed to let the floodgates open in the final two periods after holding Vegas scoreless through the first. Goalie remains the biggest question mark for this Flyers team and if the players they currently have keep giving performances like these the front office may need to consider the fact that the answer to this question is not yet in-house.

Once the puck finally did drop, the Flyers’ most productive line over the past month showed why they earned this title less than 25 seconds into the game. John Tortorella has rewarded the line of Tyson Foerster, Noah Cates, and Bobby Brink with a starting spot and they did not let him down. Foerster was the one who ultimately knocked it in but all three played together seamlessly to make it happen. After losing his six-game goal streak against the Kings, Cates has immediately rebounded by scoring a point for the second straight game with an assist on the Foerster goal.

After this goal, the rest of the first period would be silent offensively. To start the second period though, the Golden Knights seemed to flip a switch. Mark Stone put Vegas on the board with a tip-in off the rush less than a minute in. Nicolas Hague followed this with a goal of his own, and before you knew it, the Flyers’ one-goal lead turned into a one-goal deficit.

The Flyers had chances to even the score, but Knights goalie Ilya Samsonov seemed to be ready for everything, including a nearly minute-long sequence where he made four saves against three different Flyers. This lack of offensive production would carry throughout the entire period for Philly.

Vegas, on the other hand, kept the momentum firmly on their side. The Flyers seemed to get a lucky break when a Victor Olofsson one-timer clinked off the post and Philly iced the puck. However, this immediately led to a Pavel Dorofeyev goal when the Knights won the ensuing faceoff, giving them. 3-1 lead they would take into the third.

The third period was just more of the same as the second. Alexander Holtz got a goal early in the period that put the Knights up 4-1. This was essentially the curtain call for the Flyers, even if the clock said there were still 18 minutes of hockey left to play. Coming into this game the Knights were 14-0-0 in games where they scored at least four goals, and with the way the Flyers were playing,g it didn’t appear that this would be changing any time soon.

One positive to come out of this period was Travis Konecny‘s goal. While this didn’t do much to make you feel like Philly had a chance to win, it was a power-play goal and it was scored by a player who was in a bit of an offensive slump recently. Of course, this could be considered scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of positive points about the game but when you’re a rebuilding team you need to look for the positives everywhere you can because they do not come around all that often.

Despite this goal bringing the Flyers to within two, they never really got another chance to make it closer. As the clock wore down Tortorella pulled Kolosov, which eventually allowed Tanner Pearson to ice the game with an empty netter to put Vegas up 5-2.

The new year means new beginnings, and it is very likely that the Flyers will exit 2025 a much better team than they were when they entered it, but right now this is not a very good hockey team. We just need to put our faith in the front office, coaches, and players to do their best as we all press forward into this brand-new start.

The Flyers’ next game will be in Toronto against the Maple Leafs on Sunday the 5th at 7:00 pm EST. The game can be watched on NBC Sports Philadelphia.

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