Pressure On The Flyers

from Sam Donnellon of the Philadelphia Daily News, “There’s pressure there with the team we have on paper,” 24-year-old Flyers captain Mike Richards said after a spirited practice in Voorhees, N.J., yesterday. “Pressure to perform. Everybody around us has those expectations. You feel it. “What we’re going to do with those is still to see.” So begins the latest chapter of Flyers hockey, the latest effort to reconnect to the consecutive championship seasons of the mid-1970s, the way the Phillies last October finally bridged to 1980. Great players have come and gone, but the pattern of early promise morphing into lingering doubt has marked this franchise like a witch’s wart, and as the team plays its first preseason game at Detroit tonight, we approach that precipice again. Is this a team on the brink of a Stanley Cup? read on