(This month, Puck Daddy asked bloggers for every NHL team to tell us The Essentials for their franchises — everything from the defining player and trade, to the indispensable fan traditions. Here is Travis Hughes and Broad Street Hockey, giving us The Essentials for the Philadelphia Flyers.)

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By Travis Hughes and Broad Street Hockey

Player

How can we not say Bobby Clarke?

If you think of the Philadelphia Flyers, what's the first thing that comes to mind? That gap-toothed grin. That he's also the greatest player in the history of the franchise doesn't hurt, either.

Honorable mention to Ron Hextall, because what defines Flyers hockey more than a goalie beating people up?

Season

If we're going with one season, it has to be the 1973-74 season, but we're going to cheat a bit and go with a single year instead of a season: 1976 defines the Flyers for a million reasons.

They had just come off two Stanley Cup titles in a row and were still considered the best team in the NHL. In January of that year, the Flyers faced off with and beat the Soviets before going on to their third straight Stanley Cup Finals appearance. It was also the bicentennial, and this being Philadelphia and all, it was a pretty defining time for both the team and the city.

Game

Has to be the Red Army Game with the Soviets. Not only were the Flyers the only NHL team to defeat the Soviets during that year's series, the way they did it defined the franchise. It's also quite possibly the only time since their inception that the entirety of North America was behind the Flyers.

The Flyers famously intimidated the Soviets with their tough play -- winning puck battles in the corners thanks to physical superiority, and of course, running the Red Army back to the locker room after a huge hit from Ed Van Impe -- but just as the Broad Street Bullies did against NHL competition in the 1970s, they outclassed the Soviets in the skill department as well.

The Flyers completely controlled the attack both before and after the Soviets retreated to the locker room after Van Impe's hit. Today's conventional wisdom says the Flyers won the Cup twice and were successful because they simply beat the crap out of other teams, but everybody forgets that those teams were damn talented too. Never was that more true than in this game against the supposed best team in the world.

Goal

The Flyers didn't win the Stanley Cup in 1987, losing in seven games to the Edmonton Oilers. But they probably shouldn't have even made it to a seventh game after falling behind 3-1 in the series. After coming back to force a Game 6 at the Spectrum, they fell behind 2-0 in a game completely dominated by the Oilers, but improbably, they staged a comeback.

J.J. Daigneault's goal to give the Flyers a late lead and force Game 7 has been called the loudest moment in the history of the Spectrum, and that's for good reason.

Trade

When it comes to dominant players in Flyers history, no player completely, single-handedly defined an era more than Eric Lindros. The trade that brought him to Philadelphia from Quebec is the essential trade in Flyers history. They sent Peter Forsberg, Ron Hextall, Chris Simon, Kerry Huffman, Mike Ricci, Steve Duchesne, two first round picks and $15 million to Quebec for Lindros. That's still mind-blowing 20 years later.

Forsberg, Hextall, Huffman and Duchesne all played for the Flyers later down the road after the trade, as did Nolan Baumgartner, one of the players selected with those first round picks.

Unsung Hero

His relationship with the team has changed considerably over the last year or so, but Eric Lindros still remains this organization's unsung hero. He's fifth all-time in points, but by far the best player in franchise history when it comes to points per game. He defined an entire decade of Flyers hockey and was perhaps the most dominating player in the league during his era.