Is Simmonds' effort something to pin Flyers' hopes on?

THERE ARE only two domains of which to choose from these days for fans of the local hockey team.

One is the Land of Hope and Dreams, where impossible or highly improbable are vulgarities better left unspoken, where last night's 4-3 shootout victory over the Arizona Coyotes is viewed as another step in a long climb toward a potential playoff berth.

The other is Futureland, occupied by those who see too many flaws in the current team to warrant the optimism needed for that other world.

For them, last night's game is just another opportunity to evaluate which pieces would be useful amid a reconstruct, rebuild or complete overhaul, which ones have no use in that model, and, perhaps most intriguing, which pieces, in their current state, could be used to accelerate that process.

Which is as good as any way of introducing a look at Wayne Simmonds, who scored the first and last Flyers goals in starkly opposing fashion, hammering away in the crease for the first, deking Mike Smith to a supine position before roofing the game-winner in an otherwise scoreless shootout.

Simmonds' 17th goal in the Flyers 49th game puts him on a pace that makes his personal goal of eclipsing 30 more realistic than those inhabitants in that domain of eternal optimism. At 26, amid a bumpy season that reflects that of his team, Simmonds has continued a career arc that at least suggests there might be even better hockey in him in the years between now and his 30th birthday.

(That's an important number, which I'll get to a little later)

"I think I could be better," he said after the victory. "I think that's why you play this game - to try and get better every single day. And that's why you practice. I think it's all in your work ethic and how I see myself . . .

"It takes a lot to be a complete hockey player. I'd obviously like to improve on my shot. And if I could get more speed, I'd take that, too."

In their first game after what at the very least was a nice mental break, Simmonds had extra jump in his legs and, with that, his ability to annoy around the net. He began the Flyers' recovery from an early 0-2 hole with what has become his signature goal, hacking away at a loose puck sliding around in the crease until it found its own crease under Arizona goalie Mike Smith's pads.

After two periods, he had sent six shots attempts toward the net, including a rushed should-have-been-in goal with Smith out of the net that Arizona center Martin Hanzal somehow got in the way of. There was also a wide-open bang-in try gone awry by a last-second stick check at the side of the net.

The play-sheet descriptions underline how Simmonds' game has continued to develop since becoming a Flyer. What you don't know is, at age 26, what happens from here. Does that open net become a goal by a more patient or savvy player in the years to come, morphing him from valuable to invaluable in the coming seasons? Does that wiry frame continue to fill out so that pinning his stick becomes impossible even for the league's strongest defensemen?

Or is this the apex? Is the stock, so to speak, at peak value, able to be parlayed into assets for the future with greater upside?

Which brings us back to that age, 30. In case you missed it, Mike Richards was waived by the Los Angeles Kings this week, a few weeks short of his 30th birthday, his contract deemed too expensive by the other 29 NHL teams. He will now be skating in Chip Kelly's hometown for the Manchester Monarchs, of the AHL.

A fourth-line center for much of the last three seasons, Richards has, by most accounts, lost a couple of steps and a ton of confidence - his own, and from the general manager who just last summer resisted a last window in the new CBA to buy out a player without it counting against a team's salary cap. Instead, the Kings are on the hook for $5.75 million through 2020 for what now seems to be, at best hope, a utility player.

The Flyers, of course, gave that contract to a 23-year-old blossoming star who played, back then, with the same grit and determination in games that Simmonds - one of the three pieces he was traded for in 2011 - does now.

That off-ice work ethic that Simmonds embraces and defines him is something Richards has continually been prodded to embrace, with varying success. As he told ESPN's Pierre Lebrun after Kings GM Dean Lombardi chose not to cut him loose last summer, "I think before, not that I didn't work hard, but I think I just took it for granted, where stuff was going on and you could skip a workout a day or two and not think it would be problem . . . "

And Richards found that, "Things that were working when you had success suddenly aren't working anymore when you're 5 or 6 years older, when you have to work a little harder."

Simmonds has done that his whole, rising career. His stock might never be higher, and he could bring that jump-start to a new era. Or he could be that guy who keeps getting better, who skates through this and another more lucrative contract with the same desperate desire to be considered among the elite, to be, as he said last night, "Another 'G' or Jake."

I'd keep him just for that. Because no matter what young talent is in the room, what his game says is at least as important as what it does.