The Philadelphia Flyers followed an all-too-familiar script in last night's 4-2 home loss to the Toronto Maple Leafs. The Flyers were sporadically good in the game, but not good enough to deserve to win. The Maple Leafs have made themselves into a tough team to play against, and the Flyers had a hard time dealing with the puck pressure that Toronto generated.
That's pretty much the blueprint for beating the 2013 Flyers: Don't give them any respect. Pressure the puck in all manpower situations, and eventually they will crack.
The Flyers got off to a good start last night. However, the power play work that carried them to a comeback win over Winnipeg ended up stalling their momentum on this night until their four-minute power play in the third period.
Apart from the first eight minutes of the first period and the final 10 minutes of the third, the Flyers were out of synch offensively. No doubt, the Toronto puck pressure had a lot to do with it. But there were an inordinate number of passes to nobody, pucks sent back to a just-vacated point on line changes, and overloads on one side where the puck got knocked around the boards to where there were no orange jerseys in sight.
Ilya Bryzgalov had an OK game in goal. He made some very tough stops in the latter part of the game to give his team at least an outside shot at a comeback. He handled most of the routine shots without any misadventures. But he should have stopped Phil Kessel's late first period goal scored to the long side from a severe angle. Nikolai Kulemin's backhanded shot also looked potentially stoppable but was not an easy save.
Until the latter stages of the game, the Flyers and the Toronto defense made life pretty easy on Ben Scrivens last night. There weren't a lot of second chance opportunities or open shots from the slot. Philly kept trying to thread passes through sticks and skates. Eventually, the red-hot Jakub Voracek got one to Scott Hartnell for his belated first goal of the season.
Even when trailing by one goal, third period comebacks are tough to stage successfully. But there is no excuse for the degree to which the Flyers got outworked at the start of the third period. Their puck management and coverages -- which had been quite solid for most of the game up until that point -- went south in a hurry. Before they knew it, the Flyers were trailing by two goals again and an already difficult task became nearly impossible.
The Flyers capitalized on the front end of James van Riemsdyk's third-period double minor to cut the deficit to 3-2. Finally, the team displayed crisp puck movement and also moved some bodies around the zone. Voracek's shot from the circle partially deflected off a Leafs defender.
A mere 24 seconds had elapsed off the first penalty when Voracek scored. Peter Laviolette elected to send out the team's struggling second power unit immediately after the goal. The continued Keystone Kops puck play by the second unit -- it's been rare for them to gain the blueline, much less get set up in the offensive zone for scoring chances -- gave Toronto's penalty killers a chance to regroup by the time the first power play unit got back on the ice.
Even after the expiration of JVR's second penalty, the Flyers made a late push to tie the game. It ultimately failed, and the Leafs tacked on an empty net goal by Jay McClement. I may be mistaken, but I believe that not only have the Flyers not come up yet with a late tying goal on a 6-on-5, they have also yielded empty netters virtually every time Bryzgalov has been pulled for an extra attacker. I can only think of two games where they didn't.
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