The Philadelphia Flyers did not get much time to sort things out before the games started counting, and that may be showing now. Porter Martone is still adjusting to the NHL, and the shortened preseason has made that adjustment harder.
That matters because the Flyers have struggled to start the season, and the search for answers has turned toward preparation time. Young players need the preseason to make sense of the speed, the physicality and the tighter window to make decisions with the puck before the regular season begins to matter.
With another three or four preseason games, Martone and the other younger players could have had more time to settle in. Martone has plenty of talent, but talent alone does not erase the jump to the NHL, where everything happens faster and mistakes are punished sooner. For a player still learning the pace, each extra game can shorten the gap between promise and comfort.
Martone is not the only one trying to find his footing. Denver Barkey is in the same early stretch, and Oliver Bonk has slotted in on the top pairing. That leaves the Flyers leaning on several young players at once, which is a harder ask when the rest of the lineup has not been consistent enough to cover for them.
That is the part that makes the slow start more than a simple bad break. When younger players are not producing or are still adjusting, more pressure falls on the veterans, and the veterans have not been getting things going. The extra preseason games might not have fixed everything, but they could have helped some of the younger players feel more comfortable coming into the season.
So the real question is not whether the Flyers can blame everything on a shortened preseason. It is whether the young players who were asked to grow up fast can start to look settled soon enough to keep the season from slipping farther away.
