Like the rest of you, I'm going nuts waiting for the Flyers second round series to arrive. While anything is possible, I don't foresee Montreal winning the next two games to upset Washington. The Caps just have too much firepower and the two games Montreal has won have been games that Jaroslav Halak stole for his team.

Regardless of which team the Flyers play in the second round, they are going to need to significantly cut down on the number of penalties they took in the first round. The Flyers are a fine penalty killing squad, but you don't want to play with fire. That's especially true if the Capitals are the Flyers' opponent.

I don't look at Washington's 1-for-24 mark on the man advantage as a particularly positive sign. I look at it as a situation where the Caps are still in position to close out their series with Montreal in six games because they've dominated at 5-on-5. They are also due to get on a roll on the powerplay at some point. The Canadiens have used speed to skate pucks out of the zone and Washington has had trouble getting its deadly puck-movement game going.

Every matchup is different, and if the Flyers are to play the Caps, they will have devise their own strategies for containing Washington's powerplay. The Flyers have not been nearly as prolific in scoring shorthanded goals this season as they were a year ago, but one of the Caps' vulnerabilities is a tendency to make high-risk passes. That's an area that Mike Richards in particular can exploit.

I hope the lengthy layoff between the Flyers closing out New Jersey and the start of the second round will not cause them to come out flat in Game 1 of the second round. There's only so much you can do to simulate game situation at practice, especially when the team needs to avoid incurring between-series injuries at practice, which is hardly an uncommon occurrence this time of year.

At any rate, the Flyers can only take care of their own business and play the waiting game to see who their next opponent will be.

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Today's Daily Drop at Versus.com looks at the performance of the Sedin twins in the Canucks' first-round series against the LA Kings. The twins have a reputation for disappearing in big games but Daniel in particular came up huge against the Kings, along with Mikael Samuelsson.

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