The Philadelphia Flyers beat the Buffalo Sabres 3-2 last night, bring their season record to 12-14-1 and their record in the month of March to 2-3-0. With the team starved for wins and points -- and with the Flyers having played more games than any other club in the NHL -- they will gladly take the two points from last night.
However, the Flyers did little last night to inspire confidence that they are anything more than pretenders in the Eastern Conference Playoff race. There's no way to sugarcoat this: the Sabres should have been blown out of the Wells Fargo Center last night.
Buffalo played a half-hearted, undisciplined style that did not force the Flyers to work especially hard at either end of the ice. The Flyers let them hang around on the scoreboard and then nearly self-destructed.
Ryan Miller made some outstanding saves but also let a leaky goal by Simon Gagne get through him for the first of two Flyers' power play goals. Philly won -- and then nearly lost -- the game on special teams, with Max Talbot finishing off a shorthanded 2-on-1 rush and Claude Giroux tallying a power play goal in the opening 17 seconds of the second period. That was just enough offensive output to hang on to win, but the Flyers had enough quality scoring chances in the game to have generated six or seven goals if they had done a better job at finishing.
The first Buffalo goal came about at the end of an extended sequence in which the Flyers had too few players on the ice (Danny Briere went off on a line change, Claude Giroux didn't come on) and got to running around in the defensive zone. Compounding the problem, Bruno Gervais did an exceptionally poor job defending around the net, and Brian Flynn ultimately cashed in for the Sabres.
In the third period, the Flyers gave up a shorthanded two-on-one rush, finished off by Jochen Hecht after a cross-ice feed from Steve Ott. To compound matters, the Sabres' would-be tying goal got through Ilya Bryzgalov only to be swept to safety at the last moment by a backchecking Brayden Schenn.
Bryzgalov (18 saves) did come up with a couple of clutch saves in the game, but it was hardly a lights-out performance. He was good in the closing minutes when he had to be.
The Flyers head to New Jersey on Wednesday to take on the Devils.
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