NHL stars of the week take decidedly anti-Flyers slant

It's anti-Flyers week for the NHL, as each of the top three stars in the league over the past seven days can make Philadelphia's skin crawl in some form or another.

Blue Jackets goalie Sergei Bobrovsky you may remember from his Philadelphia goaltending days as the guy whose disappointing playoff performance led to the acquisition of Ilya Bryzgalov, a goalie whose bar for success remains questionably low at times.

And lastly, there is of course, Sidney Crosby.

Any success of Sidney Crosby is a failure for Philadelphia in some capacity.

KICK IT

It isn't hard to have a foot, but it is hard to build a career around it. However, some men look down at the bottoms of their legs and see glory.

Those men are the NFL's kickers, an elite unit of athletes who make up 29 of the 30 top all-time scoring ranks in league history. Sure, we've seen them trot onto the field to win the game, their smaller frames and one-bar face masks doing little in the way of intimidation.

How many times have we seen a man punting a ball into a net on the sidelines and thought, "Man, I'd love his job." Well, finally, a filmmaker has the vision to accumulate all the reasons we would probably suck at it.

Thank you for confirming that the one professional athlete's job we thought we might be able to do is, in fact, far more physcially demanding and mentally corruptive than we could possibly know.

HIDE THE SIX-FINGERED MEN

There are few performers as universally-celebrated as Mandy Patinkin. Christopher Walken probably is. Jennifer Lawrence seems pretty popular right now. Does everyone still like Louis C.K.? Or is that over yet?

Through thrilling roles like Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride and Saul Berenson on Homeland, Patinkin is a vivid entertainer, who also happens to bring a captivating beard into the equation.

But it is his musical talents that will bring Patinkin to the William Penn Charter School's Kurtz Center for the Performing Arts this Sunday, presumably to sing some Broadway and Yiddish music, not hunt down and kill a man with an extra digit on his hand.

SIXERS STOP AT FIVE

The Sixers were all smiles last night for some reason, having broken a five-game losing streak that pretty much killed whatever was left of anyone's spirit and left in its place a horrible, emotional numbness.

Still intact is the 13-straight losses away from the Wells Fargo Center, a streak that will probably not be threatened by visiting the world-eating Miami Heat on Wednesday.

But, regardless of how the Sixers play they do still have one thing: Games on the schedule. And they have to play them. It might be a law. And it's not like there's anything more productive for six guys to be doing than playing Sixers basketball.

Well, maybe one thing.