I will blog at much greater length tomorrow, but I wanted to put yesterday's game in Newark in perspective before leaving today to attend a family gathering in memory of my grandmother, who passed away in January of this year.

Of late, the Flyers have been having problems with slow starts in games. Even in their shootout victory in Washington and comeback regulation win against Montreal, the Flyers were lousy in the first period. Putting aside the controversial disallowed goal in overtime on Saturday, the Flyers were lucky to get two of four points this weekend. They were outplayed for much of the game against Calgary and waited two periods to get going yesterday against the injury-ravaged, largely punchless Devils.

I think it's easy to forget sometimes that travel, back-to-back games and busy stretches of play during the regular season really do take a toll sometimes on the ice. The Flyers just completed a stretch of 10 games in 17 days and I think it showed up in their skating legs in the back-to-back matinees on Friday and Saturday. That alone is not an excuse. The team still had enough burst to take it to the Devils in the third period yesterday. Had they dug deep a little earlier, they may well have won the game. Yesterday, they allowed Johan Hedberg to take a point away from them because they waited two periods to really start testing him, and he was very sharp in the third period, OT and shootout.

Tired legs alone didn't cause the Flyers' power play to go AWOL for the last two weeks. Fatigue was not a factor in that 8-7 monstrosity against Tampa Bay. So there are things the Flyers have to work on this week as they prepare for Wednesday's meeting with the Bruins. All in all, however, the Flyers accomplished their mission during November.

Tomorrow's blog will look primarily at Nikolay Zherdev.

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Today's Daily Drop at Versus.com looks at Sidney Crosby, who scored his 200th career NHL goal yesterday in his 396th regular season game. I tried to take an objective look at how Crosby has lived up to the hype he receives, but also why a large and vocal minority of fans outside Pittsburgh react so strongly against him.

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