(Kate Frese/SB Nation)
By Kevin Durso, Sports Talk Philly editor 
The Flyers 6-3 win over the St. Louis Blues on Saturday marked the halfway point of the 2017-18 season, and even though the Flyers played another game on Sunday to reach 42 games on the season, their five-day bye week off the ice comes at the perfect time.
The 41-game mark is certainly a time to assess what has happened so far and what needs to happen for the rest of the season.
With the Flyers off and the halfway point of the season in the rear-view mirror, here is the good, the bad and the ugly on the Flyers season so far.
The Good
Sean Couturier – The brightest spot of the Flyers season has been Sean Couturier. In training camp, he was elevated to the top-line center role and ran with the opportunity.
Couturier has already set career-highs in goals with 23 and points with 42 in the first 42 games. At this point, an All-Star Game nod should come his way, and he should be a strong candidate for the Selke Trophy when awards season rolls around.
The Resurgence of Claude Giroux, Jake Voracek and Shayne Gostisbehere – The Flyers core was put on notice this offseason as many of their top players struggled through the 2016-17 season. That hasn't been the case this season.
Let's start with Claude Giroux, who has quietly put up numbers that have him among the league leaders. Giroux is at 52 points on the season through 42 games. For perspective, in what was a career-low season in 2016-17, Giroux scored 14 goals and had 58 points. He's matched the goal total of 14 and is six points shy of his total from a year ago with half the season to go. His 52 points also have him tied for second in the NHL.
The same goes for Jake Voracek. Voracek had 61 points a season ago, including 41 assists. This season, he's already surpassed the assists with 43, which leads the NHL, and has 51 points, 10 shy of his season total from a year ago. His eight goals have him a little below the 20-goal pace he had last season, but Voracek's numbers have been just as good. He's on pace for his best season since a breakout year in 2014-15.
And lastly, there's Shayne Gostisbehere. The Flyers defenseman had a rookie season for the ages, scoring 17 goals and adding 29 assists for 46 points in 64 games. But his sophomore struggles led to some questions after a season with just seven goals and 39 points in 76 games. This season, Gostisbehere is seven points shy of last season's total with 32 points and up to nine goals on the season. He's also ranked second in points among defensemen in the NHL.
Youth Stepping Up – The Flyers have a lot of young players on the roster. While Gostisbehere certainly qualifies for the age. we've already covered the type of year he's having. This is about second-year defenseman Ivan Provorov and rookie Robert Hagg.
Provorov is starting to see the offense follow his defensive performances. Defensively, he's a workhorse, consistently playing well over 20 minutes a night and sacrificing the body to block shots and make the right defensive play. He also has eight goals and 20 points on the season through 42 games, which easily eclipses his goal total from his rookie season and has him on pace to set a new career-high in points.
Hagg has been thrown into the fire a bit, getting heavy minutes in his rookie season and really just earning the trust of the coaching staff. This is one player who doesn't have to question his place in the lineup at all and gets the minutes to back that up. What Hagg has started to provide more of is a grit and physicality that many weren't sure he would have at the NHL level. He fine-tuned his game in the AHL for three seasons, and the patience the Flyers exercised with him is starting to pay off at the highest level. Hagg isn't lighting things up offensively with one goal and six points, but he's been so responsible defensively that it doesn't really matter. He's a plus-12, tops among Flyers defensemen.
The Bad
Secondary Scoring – For as good as the numbers have looked for Giroux, Voracek, Couturier and Gostisbehere, there still is a glaring lack of secondary scoring for the rest of the Flyers.
Once you get outside the top four in scoring, Wayne Simmonds falls in next with 26 points, including 14 goals. The issue with Simmonds is that he opened the season with six goals and 11 points in the first 15 games. In the 27 games since, he has eight goals and 15 points.
From there, the Flyers next highest forward in points in Valtteri Filppula with 17. Travis Konecny is at 15. Michael Raffl and Scott Laughton are at 13. Jordan Weal is at 12. Everybody else fails to crack the 10-point mark.
The Flyers have seen some improvement in secondary scoring in the last couple of games with the likes of Laughton, Weal and Raffl finding the net, but it needs to remain consistent for the Flyers to have any success.
Penalty Kill – At a success rate of 75 percent, the Flyers penalty kill ranks 29th in the league. That's nowhere close to getting it done.
The Flyers best penalty kill this season has been a more disciplined approach. The Flyers have been shorthanded 128 times, which is tied for seventh in the league in fewest times shorthanded. That said, they have also surrendered 32 power-play goals, fourth-most in the league.
It's not just that the Flyers are getting beat by power plays that consist of tremendous talent like Pittsburgh, Tampa Bay or Nashville, it's that they also give up goals to teams that have struggled on the power play like Buffalo, Columbus and Florida.
It's the Flyers biggest area of concern, because so often when they go to the penalty kill, it has an effect on the scoreboard. It has been one of the few consistencies the Flyers have had over the past several seasons, and it remains one of their biggest pitfalls.
The Ugly
Nolan Patrick – The first half of Nolan Patrick's rookie season has been, well, forgettable. There's no question that Patrick has a good skill set. But it is an unfortunate combination of injury and lack of playing time that has hurt his first year in the NHL.
There was nothing really odd or offputting about Patrick's first few games. He was eased in a bit to start, picked up his first NHL point in his third game and his first NHL goal in his fourth game. Nothing out of the ordinary. Then came the concussion in his ninth game that set him out until mid-November.
Interestingly enough, Patrick scored his second NHL goal in his second game back from the injury. But since then, he has not found the net and has struggled to get points. He has four since scoring his second goal on Nov. 18 and just eight total for the season. A lot of that can be due to the fact that in some games, he's playing second-line minutes with legitimate linemates that could make him better. In others, he barely sees the ice for more than eight minutes and plays more of a checking-line role.
Patrick is back on a line with Simmonds and Weal now and that looks like a line with some chemistry that could get Patrick into a rhythm. But it's been a struggle so far to say the least for the 19-year-old rookie.
Dave Hakstol's Lineup Management – This has been an ongoing thing this season, and it's more or less about how Dave Hakstol handles the rookies and their place in the lineup.
We saw this last season with Gostisbehere and Konecny, the idea that a game or two watching from above would be a help. That certainly can be true. But not when the one or two games turn into a string of five or six.
Look at Taylor Leier, Travis Sanheim, Sam Morin and even someone like Jordan Weal and see that Hakstol has at times opted to sit those players for the learning experience instead of dressing the best lineup.
Bottom line, if you're going to play the kids, then play the kids. And if you're not, then management should step in and at least send them down so they will play, even if it is at the AHL level.
Inconsistency – Ah, yes, the old gold standard for the Flyers.
This has been their identifying factor for the last several seasons. You just can't get a read or feel for this team. Some days, they come out and deliver a performance that displays the talents of a playoff team. Others, they come out as flat as ever and coast their way to an expected result.
As we'll point out in our look ahead to the last 40 games, this season is far from over. But the Flyers have just been too inconsistent over the first half of the year to really be noisemakers.
Yes, the Flyers had a 10-game losing streak and recovered with a six-game win streak and wins in 11 of their last 16 to be right back in the thick of things. But that kind of up-and-down roller coaster isn't what the best teams are made of, so the Flyers need to start to show some form of consistency that is their true colors.
Moving Forward
Find an Identity – We've talked about it the recent weeks. The Flyers are a team with an identity for being consistently inconsistent. They don't have a firm system in place. They struggled to put together solid efforts on a regular basis. And it's that Jekkyl and Hyde persona that makes them so hard to figure out.
Bottom line, the real Flyers need to stand up in the second half of the season. For better or worse too, mind you. This could be a team that really does have the pieces and potential to make the playoffs and finds a way to do so, or a team that ultimately couldn't put it together and heads to another early offseason. Whatever happens, hopefully it doesn't happen with near as much inconsistency as there was early in the season.
60-Minute Efforts – A big part of that is not only finding ways to win games, but playing for 60 minutes. Even in Sunday's win against Buffalo, which on the scoreboard looked good at 4-1, the Flyers continued to sit back in the third period and try to hold off the attack instead of continuing the press on and try to expand upon the lead. That might work against Buffalo. It won't work against Pittsburgh or Washington.
There's always something with this team. It may be a slow start, a first period where they lag through and don't generate much. It could be a brief five-minute stretch in the second period, that within a game isn't much time, but is plenty of time to define the game. It could be struggling to put a game away in the third period.
Whatever it is, the Flyers will have to find ways to weather the storm at times, while remaining active and providing effort throughout the game for the entire 60 minutes.
Still in the Race – If you need any reason for motivation, look at the standings. The Flyers may be on the outside looking in still, but being one point out of a playoff spot at this stage of the season is rather miraculous when you consider how the last three weeks of November went.
Dave Hakstol really summed it up well after Sunday's game. The Flyers have worked their way out of a hole. A big one. But that's only the first part of the test. They now have half a season to either build on that comeback or find a way to send it all crashing down again.
With the Metropolitan Division being so competitive, it isn't going to be easy. But the Flyers also don't have many games left outside of the division or conference that don't hold huge implications on points. Simply put, there should be no lack of motivation when every game matters and you can't fall back on the "any points are good points" mantra by getting a game against a Western Conference team to overtime. So many of these games are four-point games.
And a lot of it is in the Flyers hands. They will control their destiny from here. And while it seemed fair to assume they were out of it in November, to their credit, they have found their way back into the race. It's on the team to finish what they have started if they want to be the playoff team they say they are.
