Five games into the 2009-10 regular season, the Flyers have established plenty of good things they can continue to build from when they start playing hockey again after a ridiculously protracted stretch of inactivity that will see the club play just one game in the next 11 days.
Before we get to the positives, here’s my take on some of the negatives that are drawing most of the attention in Flyerdom:
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Protecting leads. It would be easy to chalk up the blown leads against Washington and Anaheim to the fact that the Caps have the NHL’s most explosive offensive arsenal and Anaheim’s Teemu Selanne is still capable of being a world-class player at age 39. It’s also comforting to realize that the Flyers have some new faces and it’s only October.
What’s disturbing, however, is that this is a carryover issue from the stretch drive and playoffs that remains uncorrected. In fact, problems such as failed clears at critical junctures have plagued this team for several years. For all the talk about “attention to detail,” the letdowns still happen with too much frequency against strong opposition.
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Braydon Coburn. The defenseman has become the early season scapegoat for the defensive issues that have arisen over the last three games. Neither Coburn nor partner Kimmo Timonen played well in either the Washington or Pittsburgh games.
Coburn has gotten all the blame, but Timonen would be the first to tell you that his performances were hardly up to par, either. However, I thought that the pairing (and the team) played considerably better last night. They still aren’t where they need to be yet, but I’m not overly concerned.
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Third defensive pairing. Ryan Parent continues to have the ups and downs of a young defenseman but has been OK on the whole. The bigger worry is the very real possibility that the number-six defense slot will be a black hole all year. Danny Syvret is undersized and weak on the puck, while Ole-Kristian Tollefsen simply isn’t more than a number 7 for a playoff team.
There are no candidates on the Phantoms ready to immediately step into the void, and the club isn’t going to seek re-entry on Randy Jones. Last night, John Stevens shortened the bench and rotated two pairings when the game was on the line.
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Simon Gagne. In my opinion, anyone who knows Gagne’s history could have predicted that he’d get off to slow start coming back from his preseason groin pull. The norm for Gagne returning from injury is exactly what we’ve seen so far. He starts out looking tentative and rusty, and it takes a few weeks for him to recover his “A” game.
Last night was a step in the right direction, but he still needs to re-establish his speed. While the focus on Gagne is on his offensive production, I do think he’s been one of the most reliable defensive forwards on the club so far.
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Claude Giroux. Ice time and linemates have come into play with Giroux’s so-so start this season, but he needs to elevate his level of intensity. At the end of training camp, John Stevens paid him a backhanded compliment by saying he liked the way Giroux “has been competing the last half of camp.” Translation: He was annoyed with Giroux’s casualness at the start of camp.
In the early going of this season, Giroux hasn’t played badly but he also hasn’t really been pushing himself to lift his game to the next level. The move to Mike Richards’ line in place of Mika Pyorala was both an attempt to get Gagne and Giroux going offensively but also a direct challenge to Giroux to do enough in five-on-five play to work his way back up in the highly competitive field of power play ice time candidates on the team.
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James van Riemsdyk. NHL teams will never be honest about concussions, so it’s impossible to know how much of JVR’s absence is strictly precautionary (especially preceding the long idle stretch) and how much of it is because he still feels symptoms of the hit he took from Milan Jurcina.
Anyone who saw how woozy he was leaving the ice in the Washington game, however, could have suspected the initial declaration that JVR checked out just fine afterwards was, shall we say, a tad too optimistic of a prognosis. Hopefully, the highly touted rookie will be 100% by the time the team gets busy again late in the month.
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Faceoffs. Still a problem area for this club. While the injured Blair Betts helped prior to his shoulder injury, he’s no Joel Otto either. I addressed faceoffs in previous blogs. Suffice to say it’s going to be something the team will need to compensate for elsewhere because the club will continue to lose more faceoffs than it wins.
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Bad penalties. Again, nothing new. The prime culprits remain players such as Scott Hartnell, Dan Carcillo and Daniel Briere (the latter for offensive zone hooking or holding penalties). Last night, Carcillo got away with a slash only to commit another slashing infraction – and get nabbed – less than 10 seconds later.
Now for some of the positives:
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Quick starts. The Flyers have scored first in four of the five games so far. That’s usually a recipe for winning. All around, the club has played better first periods than they did for much of last season.
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Special teams. The Flyers have been outstanding both on the power play and the penalty kill so far. On the man advantage, the puck movement has been excellent, and Chris Pronger’s huge shot from the point has added an all new dimension that has allowed Mike Richards to move from the point to the half-boards. The results have spoken for themselves. On the penalty kill, the club has looked confident and aggressive.
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Chris Pronger and Matt Carle. Apart from the value of the Pronger acquisition in its own right, his presence has sparked Carle to elevate his game so far. They’ve lapped the all-around performance of the Timonen-Coburn through the first five games.
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Ray Emery. Despite giving up a total of 10 goals in the Washington and Penguins games, the Flyers’ new goaltender has done a good job for the most part. There have only been a couple of goals among the 15 he’s yielded that were ones you can even partially pin on him as a culprit.
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Mike Richards. The Flyers’ captain has led by example on the ice, whether it’s matching Alexander Ovechkin clutch play for clutch play or diving to clear a loose puck on the penalty kill.
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Rough, rough night for the Phantoms last night. It’s tough to find positives from the team’s 6-1 loss apart from Lukas Kaspar getting Adirondack on the board quickly, Jon Kalinski getting a point for the third straight game and Matt Clackson willingly dropping the gloves with Jon Mirasty (one of the AHL’s prime enforcers).
Apart from that, the tilt was reportedly a turnover-filled, sluggish affair with so-so goaltending from Johan Backlund. The Phantoms dressed seven defenseman and 11 forwards. The scratches were defenseman Joonas Lehtivuori (healthy), Rob Bellamy (healthy), Joey Mormina (excused by team to witness birth of his first child), Jason Ward (excused by club after birth of his family’s fifth child).
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Last night was a busy night on the NHL docket, with 13 games around the league. Today’s
Daily Drop at Versus.com looks at one of the more intriguing subplots of last night’s games: a rare meeting between the NHL’s two longest-tenured head coaches. Buffalo twelve-year bench boss Lindy Ruff’s team nipped Barry Trotz’s Predators in a briskly played 1-0 game that took just two hours, 18 minutes from start to finish.
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You can order
Pelle Lindbergh: Behind the White Mask online at
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Amazon or through
Middle Atlantic Press.
Philadelphia Flyers Blogger •NHL.com • 
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