It's not like Peter Laviolette or even his player to use excuses for losing.
You can come up with a couple of easy reasons why the FLyers were going to lose in Tampa Bay, starting with back to back games and finishing with 6 games in 9 days.
Or how about this: The Lightning right now is a better team? Period.
What is starting to bother me, however, is that the players AND the coach are saying they are getting shafted by the officials on rules interpretations and they are confused as to what kind of things they can say on the ice to an opponent or official without penalty.
And some of the people complaining are the ones who have little room to complain because they are guilty of taking bad penalties.
Six games into the season, I'm having a hard time figuring out what to make of this team. This much is certain. They are rogues on the ice. Undisciplined rogues with a league-high 48 penalties and league-high 124 PIM. That's a recipe for disaster, especially when the penalty killing has left so much to be desired.
The comments ...
From Wayne Simmonds: "They’ve changed up some of the rules and they’re calling things one one-thousandth of a second after the puck gets dumped and stuff like that, calling more stuff on the hands, and obviously, we haven’t adjusted to it.
“We have to get that done pretty quickly here or we’re going to find ourselves [in more trouble] this season.”
Laviolette: "There's a different interpretation of interference and some of the stick violations. I don't think it's one-sided. We're getting seven power plays a game, but we're giving up six or eight."
Danny Briere: "We have to be smarter; we had to adjust. We know what's being called now. It seems like we keep putting ourselves in the same position over and over again."
Lost in all the debris of what was a terrible, throw in the towel effort by the Flyers in Tampa, was that Lavy started Michael Leighton in the first place.
To me, that was as good as handing over 2 points. Leighton does not belong here. He looked awful in that one week training camp and his best days are behind him.
Given that Ilya Bryzgalov is very focused right now, I think he should have played both games, back to back. There are a couple of "rest" days this week after Tuesday that Lavy could have told Bryz to take off.
The Flyers went on the cheap this summer in backup goaltending and they are going to pay for it every time Leighton makes an appearance. Leighton's reaction times - even allowing 3 tough chances to face - are too SLOW.
And while the Flyers are not overly far behind in the Atlantic Division race, the overall East points picture is frightening because unless a team finds a path early, playoff ambitions can be quickly lost.
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