👋 Good morning! Is this thing still on? 🎤

Hello, and welcome to the first edition of The Broad Street Bulletin!

This is the part where you might ask, “What the hell is The Broad Street Bulletin and why am I getting it?” Good questions! To the second one, you gave me your email address. Do not worry, you have not signed up for anything more than that. I am going about this thing independently, and this is my pitch to you.

So, how would I describe my goals for this newnewsletter? It will be a lot like the old one (catch you up on Philly sports, try to inform, try to make you laugh), but hopefully a little more in-depth and creative.

I am excited about the change, for a few reasons:

The cadence and timing will be similar to the old one. That means…

Oh yeah, the price. Here is what I came up with, two simple rates:

If you want to try the monthly tier and end up liking the newsletter, you can switch to the yearly tier at the end of a month. There will be no discount deals, and no subsequent price hike the next year. Everyone gets the same price.

I want to treat my readers who pay their hard-earned money with respect, but I also want to draw in new people. With that in mind, I am gonna make two newsletters per month free. If you would like to get those but do not want to pay, just do not unsubscribe from these emails. But the rest of ‘em, after this week, you gotta pay for.

I wrote a little more about my journey here, if you are interested.

And since I was off for three months, I also had some Eagles #takes that were holstered. With that in mind, I wrote 10,000 words on everything that transpired on the offensive side of the ball over those three months. It was so long that Beehiiv even made me split it into two parts (Part 1, Part 2)! But you have to subscribe either on the monthly or yearly rate to read those.

Alright, enough blabbing. We have two teams in the playoffs, an NFL Draft and the worst baseball team I have ever laid eyes to talk about. — Rich

🟠⚫ Flyers 3, Pittsburgh 2: Wawa is better than Sheetz! More on the big Flyers’ win below.

🏀 Boston 123, Sixers 91: There is some dark humor in how the play-in tournament unfolded.

The Orlando Magic lose on the last day of the season to a Boston team that was not playing any of its top-eight guys. That forces them to play the 7-8 game in Philly, instead of hosting the Sixers. And then they get completely locked down by the Embiid-less Sixers in that 7-8 game. Two of the worst games you could ever imagine from a team that went all-in this past offseason.

But were the Magic strategically sandbagging? They responded to those losses by blowing out Charlotte in the 8-seed game, and getting an unproven Detroit team that they went up 1-0 on yesterday (Playoff Tobias was very much in the house). Meanwhile, the Sixers get a much more proven Boston team that now has Jayson Tatum back at full strength after he defied medical science.

I thought it would be bad, but yesterday was so incredibly ugly. The Sixers shot…

And while I thought the Sixers’ offensive process was bad early on, as the game went on, the personnel disparity became impossible to ignore. Not only that, the Sixers bricked jumper after jumper and smoked layup after layup. If the Sixers have an average shooting game, maybe this is like a… 13-point loss. Yay?

It’s not just that the Sixers are playing without Joel Embiid. They are basically playing without Tyrese Maxey, too. Despite the fact that Maxey plays more minutes than anyone in the NBA, it is clear that his Achilles' heel is actually his right pinkie. He hurt it late last season, and literally could not make a shot before getting shut down. This year, he hurt it again and once again became a much worse shooter. Since returning from injury and wearing a splint, Maxey was averaging two 3-point makes on 6.3 3-point attempts per game. Both of those numbers are way down from what he was doing the rest of the year.

After the second-to-last game of the season, an uninspiring win over a tanking Indy team, Maxey mentioned that his finger is bothering him on off-the dribble 3s. You saw it against Boston. The Sixers’ best chance at sustainable offense against this excellent team, the type of sustainable offense the Celtics can get any trip down the floor, is to set ball screens for Maxey and have him fire away. But he cannot do that right now, as he kept passing up off-the-dribble 3s for floaters and less efficient shots.

I love that Maxey is out there giving it his all. But he is not himself.

For the Sixers, all they can do is try to lose with dignity. They had an OK season, considering the limitations of the roster and how little the stars were available. But unfortunately, “OK” in this sport often means “You feel really bad about yourself as you get blasted in the first round.”

⚾ Phillies get swept by Atlanta: The New York Mets have lost 11 baseball games in a row. Bo Bichette, The $42 Million Per Year Man, has a .538 OPS. They are gonna get booed out of their own stadium tomorrow night. And I cannot even enjoy it a little bit because of how terrible the Phillies have been.

The Phils are 8-13, which is tied for their worst 21-game start of this century. But it’s actually worse than that. The Phillies have a minus-38 run differential, which is the worst in all of baseball by six runs! The White Sox are ahead of them. Paul DePodesta’s Rockies are way ahead of them.

This is not just a slow start, this is unacceptable. Are we a few more bad series away from being on Don Mattingly Watch? It sort of feels like we should be. There has been nothing redeeming about any of the Phillies’ play. They are a truly miserable watch.

And look, the pitching is clearly getting unlucky. The Phillies have a league-worst .355 BABIP (batting average on balls in play) against, which last by a comical amount. At the same time, their pitchers are giving up the lowest average exit velocity in baseball. Those two things do not add up at all to me.

I thought Saturday night’s third inning summed up the snakebitten state of affairs. Cris Sánchez gave up three two-out runs on a swinging bunt by Austin Riley (who had multiple this series) and a perfectly-placed bloop single by Mauricio Dubón. Bad luck. But also avoidable, because Edmundo Sosa booted an easy ground ball right before that would have ended the inning. The Phils’ fielding has been atrocious.

Meanwhile, the Braves are doing this with the game on the line.

The Phillies’ offense is quite feeble right now. They score a couple runs in one early inning, and then they put up zeroes for the rest of the night. Like the Eagles offense before them, they go to sleep for hours. It’s like Kevin Patullo handed the baton to Alec Bohm.

The worst part? Kyle Schwarber and Bryce Harper have been pretty good to start the year! So has Justin Crawford, I would take a .733 OPS over an entire season from him. Unfortunately, Trea Turner has been bad while Bohm and Bryson Stott have been worse than bad. Raffy Marchán is 1-27, too. That is a whole pocket of your order where you have no shot against anyone right now.

You watch the post-game, and Rob Thomson and Schwarber are preaching patience. Good for them I guess, but I dunno. A slow start is one thing, but this has been worse than that.

Play the song!

And since some in the Flyers locker room are saying Olivia Dean is this generation’s Mac Miller, hit it!

Man, I missed playoff hockey.

We will have our first postseason game in front of Philadelphia fans since 2018 later this week, which is just far too long. And in dipping our toes back into the pool, we seriously get to see Crosby, Malkin and Letang just like old times? All of those guys are still kickin’? What a time to be alive! It took me all of three minutes to fall back into hating the Penguins, right after the first STUUUUUUUU chant for Stuart Skinner.

People in the Delaware Valley are dying for a Flyers playoff run. I went to the Phillies game a week ago today, when they scored a bunch of runs (a novel concept) and put the game out of reach. After the seventh inning, I posted up at the bar outside of Pass and Stow. They were playing the third period of Flyers-Hurricanes, with the Orange and Black looking to clinch a playoff spot in Game 81. Plenty of people were already there. By the time overtime rolled around, it was packed. And when Dan Vladar made the clinching save in the shootout, the place went wild.

(Seriously, what a fitting moment. Tyson Foerster, who might have the best shot on the team and who miraculously returned six weeks earlier than expected after missing four months, gets the winning goal. And Vladar, the team’s MVP, ends it by pulling “a Boosh” with Brian Boucher in the booth. That’s the good stuff.)

The city is hungry for anything positive right now, so the Flyers have come along at the right time. I think back to that 2018 playoff series against Pittsburgh, when they were a stale, older team. The Sixers were making their first of 100 second-round exits, and they were exciting and up-and-coming at the time. That has largely flipped back the other way around. There is an energy around this Flyers team.

Oh yeah, the game.

Boiled down to its essence, I just think the Flyers played a more playoff-y game. They clogged the neutral zone and dared the Penguins to play a dump-and-chase style that they clearly did not want to play. The Pens finished with a measly 17 shots, when they averaged 29 during the season. Rick Tocchet had an excellent game plan against the franchise that he won three Stanley Cups with (one as a player, two as an assistant coach).

The Orange and Black also threw their bodies around. And that physicality started with Sean Couturier of all people. Coots had seven hits, and he particularly destroyed Egor Chinakhov in the first period. Boom!

Coots has been here forever, and this really felt like a full circle moment for him. I remember his coming-out party, which was in the same arena he played in on Saturday. In Game 2 of the Flyers’ raucous first-round win over Pittsburgh in 2012, possibly my favorite non-championship playoff series ever, Coots scored a hat trick at 19 years old.

Now 33, Coots is a different player following two back surgeries. Like the Flyers as a whole, he went through a major slump in the middle of this season. Coots had 31-game goalless drought, which is, uh, a lot. That got him demoted to the fourth line, where he closed the season strong playing next to Luke Glendening and rotating cast of characters (Garnet Hathaway right now). But Coots did not pout. He scored six times in the last 17 games, including a two-goal performance in a monster late-season win in Winnipeg. Good piece by Charlie O’Connor on his season($). Unlike most of his teammates, Coots has real playoff experience. It showed.

And how about another one of the older guys, Travis Sanheim? Crosby, who did nothing but take penalties for pulling helmets off guys’ heads, did not have a good time playing against Sanheim on Saturday. In fact, Crosby was so frustrated that he slashed Sanheim in the final minutes. Sanheim was all over him, and he also scored the biggest goal of the game: A beautiful split job into the high slot, where he fired a wrister past Skinner.

And then Porter Martone, who has changed all of our lives, put the game out of reach (not really, Vladar had to make a point-blank save right before the final buzzer) with the, “Oh yeah, I am gonna be a superstar” goal. That is 11 points in 10 games for the rook, if you are counting at home. You could tell right away that he was gonna be good. In his first two games, Martone had zero goals but fourteen shots. You cannot teach his hockey IQ. He struggled at times to keep up with the pace on Saturday, but screened Skinner on Sanheim’s goal and put the game away with a picture-perfect snipe. Pretty, pretty good.

(Speaking of Martone, who would have thought the most important game of the Flyers’ season was Wisconsin 4, Michigan State 3 in the elite eight of the NCAA Hockey Tourney? If Sparty does not lose that game, the Flyers do not get their hands on Martone for at least another two weeks. Thank you to head coach Mike Hastings and the Badgers! You the real MVP!)

It was interesting watching the Flyers in the post-game locker room. Trevor Zegras, a guy who I compared to Spicoli multiple times because of his goofy post-game interviews, was a cliché machine. So were all of his teammates. The Flyers do not seem satisfied with one win in Pittsburgh, and why should they? If you look at the entire season, the Penguins were better than the Flyers. But the Orange and Black closed the season like a freight train with a 17-6-1 record, to become the first NHL team to make the playoffs after facing at least a nine-point deficit through 60 or more games played in a season.

The Flyers are The Hot Team, because they would not be in the playoffs if they were not.

So, it was not entirely stunning to see them stifle the Penguins in front of a crowd that was groaning the entire game. Another one, bartender.

The news and notes of the weekend…

Giants trade Dexter Lawrence: To Cincy, for the 10th pick in the draft!

I do not know exactly what to think of this. On one hand, the Eagles did just fine with Lawrence in the division despite his lofty reputation. But Warren Sharp seems to think Lawrence has been underrated because he has played so much ball against the Eagles and Cowboys’ lines.

I still think getting the No. 10 pick for a soon-to-be 29-year-old is good business for the Giants, even if it says something about what the Bengals think about this draft.

We will have more about said NFL Draft as the week goes on.

Jhoan Durán, 15-day DL: Bad run for obliques in Philadelphia. Not like the Phillies are giving him too many chances to close.

Felix Reyes up, Otto Kemp down: Dave Dombrowski talked up Kemp a bunch this offseason as a left-field platoon bat. Well, Kemp did not make it a month. He had multiple adventures in left field and went 2-17 against lefty pitching. Oops.

Up in Kemp’s place is Felix Reyes, who delivered the best Phillies moment of the weekend. Nice call by Joe Davis, too.

Speaking of national Phillies announcers, how ‘bout the Krukker having to wear a suit with no hat? We are down bad.

Zack Wheeler: In what was expected to be his final rehab start, Wheels gave up four runs (two homers) in four innings, with decreased velo in the low-90s. Gulp.

Seems like he will pitch in Atlanta this weekend.

The Phillies are unfortunately playing the same two teams that beat their brains in this week. But those series are on the road, so maybe they can get their act together? Aaron Nola against Colin Rea (7:40 p.m., NBC Sports Philly Plus).

But tonight is all about the Orange and Black. Game 2 in Pittsburgh is upon us (7:00 p.m., NBC Sports Philly and ESPN).

Let’s make it a good one.