The Eagles winning the Super Bowl would have been enough for
quite a while. After the Super Bowl, there’s not much on the sports calendar
for the rest of February. But, when your team wins the Super Bowl, then who
cares about the rest of the month? I’m sure that’s how plenty of Philadelphia
sports fans felt following the evening of February 4.
But, what has followed with the two teams that reside at
Wells Fargo Center lends credence to the old cliché “Winning is contagious.”
After each team won today, the Flyers and Sixers are a combined 16-0-1 since that
memorable Sunday night for the Eagles in Minneapolis. When you think about where all three of these
teams were at the beginning of February in 2017 and look at where they are now,
it’s night and day.
The Eagles had finished last in the NFC East and both the
short-term and long-term futures of the organization were difficult to
decipher. Granted, it was the first year of a new regime, but there was much
more unknown than known when it came to Philadelphia’s football team last
February. The Flyers were on their way to becoming the first team in NHL
history to miss the playoffs in a season in which they had a 10-game winning
streak. There were many more questions than answers surrounding head coach Dave
Hakstol, whose team had clearly regressed after making the playoffs in his
first season.
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| Mitchell Leff/Getty Images Ben Simmons and Joel Embiid have the current and future states of the Sixers looking very fruitful. |
The Sixers had just lost Joel Embiid for the rest of the
year to a torn meniscus after it was later revealed he played with the bad knee
in what would be his final game of 2016-17. The game was televised on ESPN and
the optics of the situation were that the ownership group wanted their best
player in front of the national audience despite his injury. Only a couple
weeks after Embiid’s final game of the season, the Sixers announced the first
overall pick of the 2016 NBA Draft, Ben Simmons, would be held out for the rest
of the year with a foot injury. Fans would have to wait until the fall to see
the two prized possessions of “The Process” take the floor together.
Fast forward to the end of February one year later and the
Eagles have won the Super Bowl, the Flyers may well win the NHL’s Metropolitan
division and the Sixers could host a playoff series in the first round. The writing
was on the wall for all the professional teams in Philadelphia to improve, but certainly
not this quickly. In one year, the Eagles went from last place to Super Bowl Champions,
the Flyers went from out of the playoffs to perhaps winning the NHL’s deepest
division and the Sixers went from non-playoff team to potential top four seed
in the Eastern Conference. If this month has been any indication of what the
rest of 2018 may hold for Philadelphia sports, the Phillies are due for a sharp
increase in wins in what figures to be a wide-open NL East after the preseason
favorite Washington Nationals.
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| Bill Streicher/USA Today Sports Young defensemen Shayne Gostisbehere and Ivan Provorov are at the forefront of the Flyers' success this season. |
The most encouraging thing about all of this is that none of
it appears to be a fluke and the teams in Philadelphia are positioned well for
the long-term future. All four teams are rife with young talent. While there’s
never a guarantee that bad teams are going to be able to stockpile draft picks
and prospects and turn things around, the futures for all four teams in the
City of Brotherly Love are bright. Before this year, the Eagles had not won a playoff
game in nine years. The Flyers had missed the playoffs in three of the previous
five seasons. The Sixers were trapped in the middle of the NBA for a decade and
the Phillies lost the most games out of any team in Major League Baseball since
the start of 2013. All four teams went through coaching changes and front
office makeovers. It’s nice to have those last five years for all four teams in
the rear-view mirror now. Time to enjoy a new era. A
winning era.
