Flyers 4-5 Ducks: how Anaheim turned a 2-0 hole into the night Carlsson answered Philadelphia
Up two goals on the fastest pair of power-play strikes the NHL has seen this season, the Flyers let the Ducks off the hook — and the kid they tried to steal in July led the comeback.
There are losses that sting because of the standings, and losses that sting because of the subtext. Saturday night at Xfinity Mobile Arena in Philadelphia managed both. The Anaheim Ducks erased a 2-0 deficit to win 5-4, ending a five-game losing streak — and the player who hurt the Philadelphia Flyers most was Leo Carlsson, the center the Flyers tried to pry out of Anaheim with an offer sheet barely four months ago.
The start Philadelphia dreamed of
For twenty minutes, this was the Flyers' night. Matvei Michkov opened the scoring at 13:59 of the first period, firing through traffic from the top of the circles on a 5-on-3 power play. Sixty-three seconds later, Travis Sanheim found the seam and Porter Martone tapped it in at the right post — two power-play goals 1:03 apart, per NHL.com the fastest pair by any team this season. A team that had started the year 0-6-3 and then ripped off three straight wins looked, briefly, like it had found something sustainable.
It didn't survive the second period.
The middle frame that flipped it
Carlsson started the rally at 8:38 of the second, one-timing Cutter Gauthier's feed from behind the net. A.J. Greer tied it at 13:07 with a goal that survived a video review. Philadelphia briefly restored the lead when Tyson Foerster scored shorthanded at 15:04, sliding a shot under Lukas Dostal's pads — but just 75 seconds later Judd Caulfield redirected Alex Killorn's pass to make it 3-3 heading into the third.
Ducks coach Joel Quenneville said the game "changed completely" once Anaheim got its first goal back, and the shape of the period bore him out: three Anaheim goals in under eight minutes of game time, against a Flyers team that had controlled everything to that point.
Luneau's night, and the offer-sheet subplot
The third period belonged to Anaheim's younger legs. Tristan Luneau put the Ducks ahead for the first time at 2:00, beating Joseph Woll between the arm and body from the right side, and finished with a goal and two assists — the first three-point game of his NHL career. "Always feels good when the team wins," Luneau said afterward, which rather undersold it. Carlsson was blunter about his teammate: "When he has confidence, he's insane."
Then came the goal with the longest backstory. Beckett Sennecke redirected Carlsson's feed at 7:10 on the power play — Anaheim's first power-play goal in 15 chances across five games — to make it 5-3. For Carlsson, a goal and an assist in his first game against Philadelphia since July 3, when he signed a five-year, $90 million offer sheet with the Flyers that Anaheim matched six days later. The Flyers spent the summer trying to make Carlsson the centerpiece of their rebuild. On Saturday he was the centerpiece of their unraveling.
Michkov pulled one back at 8:17, jamming a loose puck under Dostal from the crease, but the Flyers never found the equalizer. Dostal finished with 28 saves to Woll's 21.
What it means for both benches
For Anaheim, now 5-6-0, the result stops the bleeding: five straight regulation losses had drained the early-season optimism, and the power play had gone cold enough that Sennecke's goal felt like a second weight lifted. A rally win on the road, built by Carlsson, Luneau and Sennecke — the core this franchise is betting on — is exactly the kind of evidence a young team needs that its floor is higher than its record.
For Philadelphia, 3-7-3, the frustration is that the climb out of the 0-6-3 start had been real. Michkov extended his point streak to five games (six goals, eight points) and Zegras ran his to four games with two more assists; Rasmus Ristolainen even returned after nine games out with an upper-body injury. The pieces produced. The structure didn't hold. Coach Rick Tocchet's verdict — that his team "let them off the hook" and should have won — is hard to argue with after conceding five times from a 2-0 lead.
What to watch next
The Michkov-Zegras connection is becoming the Flyers' identity: between them, 15 points across their active streaks, much of it on a power play that produced the season's fastest one-two punch. The question is whether Philadelphia can protect leads well enough for that firepower to matter. For the Ducks, watch whether the power play stays unlocked and whether Luneau's breakout travels — and circle the next Anaheim-Philadelphia meeting, because the Carlsson subplot is clearly not done writing itself.