Even before the opening faceoff of last night's game, the Philadelphia Flyers were in trouble. The match against the Florida Panthers was the epitome of a "trap" game. These are the sort of matches that may favor one side on paper -- superior talent, better record, season series advantage -- but which are actually ripe for the underdog team to win.
The Flyers were starting a lengthy homestand after a season-high six-game road trip. Those first games, regardless of the opponent, are often struggles.
They were playing the second-half of back-to-back games, the middle game of a 3-in-4, and their seventh game in seven cities in 10 days. That included two separate trips to Canada. That is about as brutal as a schedule can get, and fatigue was bound to set in. Conversely, the Panthers had been off since Monday and were coming off a four-game homestand. Their legs were bound to be much fresher than the Flyers.
The game against the archrival Penguins was played at an emotional fever pitch. It's hard to muster the same intensity when there's an immediate turnaround the next night. What's more, all of the Flyers' technical preparations were geared toward playing the Penguins. Meanwhile, the Panthers had several days to prepare solely for the Flyers.
The Panthers were bound to be the hungrier team. Florida brought a five-game losing streak to town, and had just gone through an extremely frustrating homestand. They took three straight overtime losses followed by a shutout defeat at the hands of the Maple Leafs. They were almost eager to get back on the road again, and turn the page.
There was a danger of the Flyers being too attack-oriented against the Panthers, overlooking attention to defensive detail. Goals had come easy for the Flyers this week. They scored a combined 13 between Monday's 7-0 humiliation of the Islanders and the 6-5 slugfest with the Penguins. Moreover, the Flyers had outscored the Panthers in the first two games of the season series by a combined 9-3.
Philly pummeled the Panthers by a 7-1 count in the first meeting of the season series. In the second game, the teams played to a 2-2 tie after overtime, before Florida won the shootout skills competition to take the second point from the game. However, after a slow start in the first period, the Flyers had dominated about 35 minutes of the game (including the last five minutes of regulation and the entire overtime period).
Add all of these factors together, and the Flyers were bound to face a tough challenge in beating Florida last night.
It's not that the players or coaches were unaware of the invisible "trap stamp" on the Panthers' back. The game's dangers were discussed by the veterans, along with the need for intelligent energy management. Peter Laviolette's decision to start Ilya Bryzgalov in goal in a match where the schedule fairly screamed for Brian Boucher to start was almost certainly intended as a message to his team that the coach wasn't overlooking the Panthers and neither should they.
Mike Knuble summed it up best.
"As a player you’ve seen it a hundred times when you have a big emotional game and then you don’t come out quite as ready and you don’t have that same sense of urgency. You spend all that energy and pay a lot of attention to the detail the night before," he said.
"Coming out, we let a couple guys get behind us, and a penalty shot, we were leaving a lot on our goalie right out of the gate. We have to support him better than that. We could have played a real simple game in the beginning, but it sort of becomes a mind game as far as being prepared. Yesterday’s game was all about emotion and today’s game was more about using our mind and trying to get going in the right direction."
Unfortunately, the Flyers fell deep into the trap and were never able to climb out. For all intents and purposes, the game was over at the 10:15 mark of the opening period when Jonathan Huberdeau utterly shredded Bryzgalov on a penalty shot goal that put the Flyers in a 3-0 hole.
The "attack, attack, attack" mentality came into play early. The Flyers did a fine job of generating forechecking pressure during much of the first period but their attention to defense, as feared, was lacking.
Three successive mental breakdowns in a two-minute span resulted in goals by Peter Mueller and Tomas Kopecky (breakaway), followed by a breakaway for Huberdeau that resulted in a questionable penalty shot ruling on what should have been a holding minor on Kimmo Timonen.
Every once in awhile, a team can recover from a three-goal deficit but the Flyers just didn't have the legs to make that a realistic possibility. The team had its share of scoring chances against Scott Clemmensen but couldn't finish. When Florida's lead grew to 4-0 in the second period, and Boucher came into relieve Bryzgalov, the rest of the game was simply a matter of playing out the string.
The Claude Giroux line (with Tye McGinn playing in place of injured Panthers' nemesis Matt Read) had all kinds of scoring opportunities before the red-hot Jakub Voracek finally bagged a late goal that was meaningless apart from making the final score 5-2 and extending Voracek's point streak.
Earlier in the third period, Luke Schenn ripped a center point shot through a Wayne Simmonds screen to get Philly on the board. The Flyers' goals were sandwiched around a Mueller rebound goal scored as a result of some loose coverage in the defensive zone.
Kimmo Timonen's assessment of the game was similar to Knuble's.
"I usually don't make up excuses I would usually say for [a game like this], but you saw a tired Flyers team today. Coming back from 6 game road trip. Played a really hard charged game yesterday. Got two points, got home at 2 o clock. We were tired today."
In an effort to put a little emotion into his team, Nicklas Grossmann (who rarely fights) dropped the gloves with Panthers' enforcer George Parros in the second period of the game. It was actually his second career fight with Parros. Grossmann used his size and strength to hold his own early in the bout, but Parros simply knows his way around a hockey fight better than Grossmann does and eventually took over.
Unfortunately, any emotional lift from a usual non-fighter gamely going toe-to-toe with an enforcer was fleeting. Grossmann got bloodied for his troubles and the Flyers' energy level spiked briefly after the fight but then dissipated quickly.
The Flyers are once again two games below .500 on the season. They go back at it on Saturday afternoon against the Winnipeg Jets.
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In Peter Laviolette's postgame press conference, no one asked the head coach why, given the schedule and the massive workload the starting goalie has handled, he elected to start Bryzgalov rather than Boucher. Laviolette is not one to take kindly to such questions -- I'm sure his response would have been a glowering non-answer -- but I do think it was a legitimate question to ask.
As mentioned in the top section, my own read on why Laviolette started Bryzgalov was that he wanted to send a "no excuses" message to his troops by coming right back with his starter after the game against the Penguins.
Unfortunately, Bryzgalov didn't have it last night. He was a mess in goal. Yes, there were breakdowns in front of him that led to all four goals. Two of the goals were breakaways (one via penalty shot). But the goalie himself inspired zero confidence that he was going to come up with a single clutch save when needed.
When you say a goalie played a poor game, a lot of people's knee-jerk response is to say "Well, which of the goals were his fault?" But soft goals are only part of it. A goalie can play a poor game without letting in any goals that were directly his fault.
Last night, right from the first shift of the game, Bryzgalov did not look the least bit sharp or mentally locked in. He wasn't square to the shooters and looked slow to reacting to just about everything fired his way. More than his teammates, Bryzgalov looked fatigued out there out there. His movements were those of a player with no energy.
He had trouble tracking pucks (for instance, he was saved by his goal post on a Dmtri Kulikov shot in the opening minute of play). Routine shots weren't handled cleanly, and he left fat rebounds that his defense had to clear.
None of these plays ended up in Florida goals, so a lot of people immediately overlook them in favor of focusing only on the goals that got scored. But the way a goalie handles the plays that DO NOT result in goals -- and then his response after a goal is scored against him -- goes a long way in either instilling calm and confidence in the team in front of him or else creating a sense of panic and a feeling that any one-on-one situation against a tough shooter is going to result in a goal rather than a clutch save.
Bernie Parent used to tell Pelle Lindbergh that the difference between a good goalie and a great one is that a good goalie makes it tough to score the first goal against him but it becomes progressively easier once he's beaten. A great goalie makes the second goal against him even tougher than the first. He stays calm (even if the first goal was one he felt he should have stopped) and he tries to slam the door the rest of the way.
Bryzgalov didn't do that last night and, quite frankly, hasn't done it in three of his last four starts. He was banging his stick, giving off frustrated vibes. He left plenty of holes to shoot at by being not only slow to react but sloppy in his positioning.
In short, even though none of the Florida goals were directly his fault, Bryzgalov's overall play last night was as much part of the problem as the team in front of him.
He had been so good in most of his starts -- win or lose -- up until the one in New Jersey. He did have a 19-save shutout against the Islanders on Monday where he looked locked in, despite a relative scarcity of chances against him.
But Bryz was not very good against the Devils. He wasn't nearly as bad as Tomas Vokoun in the game in Pittsburgh, but he was definitely off his game in the third period. He followed it up with the subpar effort last night.
Bryzgalov's save percentage on the season has tumbled to an even .900, which is an accurate reflection both of how well he had been playing in the first month of the season and how much he's struggled in the last week. Bad games and bad weeks happen to all goalies. Fatigue is also a factor in such a condensed schedule, but unfortunately there's no time to rest Bryzgalov now. Instead, he needs to get back on track quickly.
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The loss of Matt Read for six weeks due to torn muscles around his ribcage is a tough break both for the player and for the team. He had been one of the team's most consistently solid players, making valuable contributions on both sides of the puck and injecting some speed into the lineup. His versatility is what makes him tough to replace in the lineup.
Scott Hartnell skated yesterday at the SkateZone. He is about seven to 10 days from being ready to return to the lineup.
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