Remembering what Sean Couturier can do

Like many, I fear losing my brain. As I get older, the creeping thoughts of not having my memories and only living in the present as a weathered and elderly person, are only getting louder. The misremembering facts, misplacement of items, or forgetting something entirely, is not just a coincidence that I can shoo away anymore. I am now worried and overtaken with anxious thoughts of well if that is happening now, what is it going to be like in 50 years?

So when I realized earlier this week that we have not seen Sean Couturier play hockey in over 20 months, I felt a rush of wonder. I had to even remind myself what he was like as a hockey player and what this team was like with him on it.

Put plainly, it is an incredibly different team. And put down with more detail, it is an incredibly different team.

Owen Tippett, who has now cemented himself as one of the top offensive options on this team, has played 98 games for the Flyers since being acquired in the middle of the 2021-22 season. He has not yet played a game with Couturier. And the same goes for Noah Cates; and Cam York has played just three games with the top center. It just feels like an impossibly long time since we have seen one of the best Flyers of the last decade to actually play a game of hockey.

Couturier’s last game was a measly 4-3 win over the Ottawa Senators on Dec. 18, 2021. Of the 19 other skaters the Flyers had in the lineup, only six are still with the team. Six. And two of them (Travis Konecny and Travis Sanheim) were involved in trade rumors just a couple of months ago. The other players like Oskar Lindblom, Claude Giroux, Zack MacEwen, Keith Yandle, and Martin Jones, have been long-gone from this team and are all settled in to their new homes or have just completely retired. That’s the last time we’ve seen Couturier play for this team.

When Couturier played his last game, we were still over 14 months from the firing of Chuck Fletcher. The Flyers were doing their typical spin cycle of attempting to be a team that they are certainly not and we were collectively just down in the dumps. Now, there is at least a clear direction this team is heading and Couturier will join them in this effort to aim for the future rather than the present.

The seven remaining years on his contract keeps the 30-year-old forward tied to this team for the foreseeable future, but that shouldn’t necessarily be viewed as a bad thing for a hockey club focusing on youth. Couturier has done a heck of a lot of great things on the ice and will be able to do some of the heavy lifting to make the teammates that are about a decade younger than him, look damn good.

So, maybe we should just remember what exactly he can do.

Selfishly, I needed a quick reminder of who Sean Couturier exactly is as a hockey player. Many things have happened in all of our lives since he last played a game for the Flyers. Many players have come and gone through the orange and black. While sometimes this roster feels talentless, there should always be a thread of hope during the summer and this is it. Sean Couturier returning to what he does best.

And if solo efforts against your arch-rival to give an early-second period lead in Game 6 of the first round, doesn’t exactly fill the hockey highlight-needing part of your brain, well of course Couturier went on to ruin about every opposition’s night two seasons later.

Couturier’s Selke-earning 2019-20 season – where he didn’t even play his best defensive hockey and instead scored 22 goals and 59 points in the COVID-shortened campaign – wasn’t even that long ago. It might feel like another era of professional hockey and you might expect these highlights to be playing on a monochromatic tube television with the humming and whirring of your childhood, but they aren’t!

In just a few minutes of footage, it’s hard to not get excited about Couturier returning to the ice. Like we’ve already mentioned, this team has been turned over multiple times since we have seen him on the Flyers and it is a completely different roster full of young talent that could revitalize Couturier’s career.

We’re not saying that he will win any more individual awards for what he is doing, but could we maybe hope to see a productive, two-way season from him?

If that doesn’t happen, it’s not the end of the world, either. But we could at least get a little wound-up thinking about stability down the middle for this season, and for one of the best complete centers of his generation to be back on the ice and fully healthy.

Let’s just all watch some YouTube highlight packages until training camp starts.