Only one team can win the Stanley Cup each season. While many folks hyper-focus on the fact that the Flyers have not won the Stanley Cup since 1975 -- understandably, since its hockey's ultimate prize, and the closer a team gets, the more it hurts to fall short -- they also miss the big picture.
This is the big picture: For the most part, the Philadelphia Flyers have been an extremely successful National Hockey League franchise. Consider the following:
1) In the years since the Flyers joined the NHL for the 1967-68 season, the team has reached the Stanley Cup Final eight times: 1973-74, 1974-75, 1975-76, 1979-80, 1984-85, 1986-87, 1996-97 and 2009-10. Only Montreal (11) and Boston (9) have gone to the Final more times in the same span.
2) The Flyers have also reached the semifinal/conference final an additional eight times for a total of 16 seasons of either playing for the Cup or being among the four final teams left standing.
3) Even counting
only the years since the last Cup championship in 1975, no team in the NHL has reached at least the semifinal more times than the Flyers (13). As for regular seasons, dating from the same period, only Montreal has a higher regular season percentage of points earned.
4) Critics will say, "Quit living in the past. What have the Flyers done more recently?" Dating back to 1995, the Flyers have gone 18-for-21 in reaching the playoffs. Only Detroit (21-for-21) has exceeded that total among the NHL teams that have been in existence for the entire time period.
The reality of the National Hockey League is that all teams and franchises have ups and downs. Decades-long Cup championship droughts are a part of
every franchise's history at some juncture. Some good franchises have never won it all, such as the St. Louis Blues and Washington Capitals.
Others have built championship caliber teams at least partially via tanking and/or moving or threatening to move their franchise to ransom a taxpayer-funded new arena. The Flyers have always gone out and competed, win or lose.
Additionally, Ed Snider was always as loyal to Philadelphia as the fan base was to his beloved hockey team. Even when the Flyers current arena stalled in the development phase in the early 1990s, Ed Snider steadfastly insisted that the arena be privately funded. In fact, he turned down an offer to relocate to Camden for a publicly funded building.
Cup or not, that is the epitome of a franchise with a successful history. The Flyers have earned every right to bask in their 50th anniversary. In the meantime, there is very deep pipeline of prospects in the farm system even as the Flyers continued to stockpile assets while producing a 96-point, playoff-bound season last year.
In the short term, the Flyers probably remain a playoff bubble team. There's not much difference between the teams that just qualify for the playoffs and those that miss within a range of about five or six points. The Flyers are still in that grouping.
In the not too distant future, however, both history and the law of averages relative to the talent and depth within the developmental system suggest the team will be back in serious contention to be perennial Cup contenders again. That's not blind optimism. There's a plan in place and the early stages of a roster and salary cap remake have thus far been promising.
Philadelphia Flyers Blogger •NHL.com • 
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