Heading into the regular season, the last thing anyone expected to be worried about with the Flyers was the club's ability to puck the puck in the net. Despite the club's scoring issues through the first five game, there is still no major reason to be concerned.

There are a couple of individual players (Danny Briere, Claude Giroux) who have been productive in the early going, but you can't truthfully say there has been a single line combination that has been effective on a game-in and game-out basis so far. I would not be surprised to see Peter Laviolette shake up the lines this week. One such step may be to take Scott Hartnell off Briere's line for a few games, put Jeff Carter back at center and reunite him with Hartnell. But line changes alone aren't going to fix the issues that have emerged over the first five games.

The club has a lot of areas that need cleaning up, starting with this week's practices and continuing into Thursday's game against Anaheim and beyond. Specifically:

* The team needs to cut back on the number of minor penalties it has been taking. You can live with penalties that come from being a little overaggressive or ones that prevent a scoring chance, but a lot of the penalties the Flyers have been taking have been of the careless or frustration variety.

* The Flyers need to execute better at the basics in the offensive zone: win the battles on the walls, get shots on net from the point and get traffic moving at the net. When that happens, the goals with start to come and the ice will be opened up for the finesse game.

* The powerplay needs to generate better puck movement and do a better job at breaking the PK box/triangle.

* The Flyers have not been a very good faceoff team in recent years and, with the same essential personnel, that didn't figure to be a big strength for the club this year either. But the team is capable of doing better than its current 46% success ratio.

* The club needs to focus heavily on conditioning and skating this week. Players such Ville Leino and Chris Pronger are still not up to par mobility wise and game conditioning has also looked like an issue for captain Mike Richards among a few others.

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