Inside the Flyers: Maybe Gary Bettman was right: NHL fans come back fast, and in droves

As the Flyers and the Penguins played before a packed house at the Wells Fargo Center in Saturday's season opener - the crowd of 19,994 was the largest in Flyers history for a regular-season game - it was easy to forget how the Twitterverse was so full of venom, frustration, and threats during the NHL's 113-day lockout.

How dare the players, averaging $2.4 million per season, have the audacity to complain!

How dare the filthy-rich owners shut down the game when it had produced a record $3.3 billion in revenue last year!

The fans planned to revolt, to stay away, to not buy any NHL merchandise, so help them.

And then camps opened, and it took about a nanosecond for all to be forgiven. Record crowds were reported at many NHL facilities, including the Flyers' in Voorhees.

And we're talkin' about practice.

So it turns out the NHL knew what it was doing when it waited out union boss Donald Fehr and squeezed out as many concessions as it could, all along insisting the fans would be back.

Say what you will about Gary Bettman - the NHL commissioner who is loved by fans as much as Sidney Crosby is adored in Philadelphia - but the man knows how to read his paying customers.

Actually, those paying customers are the ones who will benefit the most from an abbreviated season.

Even most puckheads think an 82-game season is too long, and casual fans don't seriously follow the sport until late January or early February. The NHL usually starts in early October, when baseball's postseason is heating up and overshadows hockey. Then you have the NFL.

Starting the NHL in late January is perfect. (Though, for financial reasons, it will never be considered during "normal" conditions, of course.) Baseball is done. Most NFL teams are done. In a 48-game season, each matchup will be magnified because teams don't have as much time to secure a playoff spot.

More drama. Games every other night. And season-ticket holders have more disposable cash because of the money they saved from the canceled games.

Perfect.

In addition, the condensed 48-game season isn't as big of a deal as some folks are making it.

Oh, there will be some brutal stretches. The Flyers, for instance, open the season by playing on back-to-back days, and they play seven games in the first 11 days.

A draining start?

Absolutely.

But if you take a closer look at the schedule, you'll find the Flyers will play 48 games in 99 days. A year ago, they played their final 48 games in 103 days.

So we're talking about playing the same amount of games in four fewer days, spread over three-plus months.

The biggest difference is that the players had just a six-day training camp to get ready. Some players did stay sharp by playing in Europe or the AHL during the lockout, but most hadn't played a game in several weeks before Saturday's opener.

All of which figures to produce more injuries than if the players had a full training camp and some exhibition games.

For that reason, the teams that have the best depth will be the ones who survive. For the Flyers, that means players like winger Tye McGinn and defensemen Erik Gustafsson, Marc-Andre Bourdon, and Andreas Lilja will probably be taking the Glens Falls-to-Philadelphia route as the injuries mount. (Gustafsson and Bourdon are recovering from injuries suffered with the AHL Adirondack Phantoms.)

But, for the time being, the fans aren't concerned about any shortcomings from a shortened season. The pluses far outweigh the minuses.

No matter what you read on the Twitterverse during Lockout III.