With 27 games played to date, the Philadelphia Flyers have played more games this season than any other team in the NHL. That is bad news when the team is already mired in 11th place in the Eastern Conference and is three points behind the eighth-ranked New York Rangers (who have played 24 games).
When a team that entered the season expecting to be playoff contenders has already racked up 14 regulation losses, it goes without saying that very individual few players on the team have been playing to their full capabilities.
On a collective level, the problems have been numerous, but the main issues can generally be boiled down to a lack of improvement in team defense and less offensive consistency than the team had a year ago.
In terms of team defense, there is often a tendency to hyper-focus on the six players on the blueline. That group, on the whole, has been far from stellar. However, a team could have six All-Stars on defense and it still won't have a great goals against average unless the forwards make a consistent commitment to backchecking and going to the right places in the defensive zone. The Flyers forwards don't do that with nearly enough consistency (and, really, they never have during the Peter Laviolette era).
It has often been said that defense and goaltending are symbiotic. Over time, they are going to elevate one another or, if one is consistently subpar, it's going to drag down the other area. If a team has no faith in its ability to get clutch saves, it correspondingly presses too much offensively. It's a vicious cycle.
The Flyers have not been a very good team at five-on-five this season. They have yielded 52 even strength goals against (24th of 30 teams in the NHL) while scoring 43 (21st in the NHL). As a result, they have often had to live and die on their special teams play and even then -- such as in the loss to the Rangers last week -- they'll still lose some key games because of their inability to control even strength play.
This team has not been nearly good enough in crunch time. Philadelphia is winless in five games that have entered the third period tied. In fact, all five losses have been in regulation. That has really hurt the team in the standings. In general, bad third periods have plagued the Flyers all season. They have been outscored by a 30-19 margin in third periods. The 19 goals scored ranks 22nd in the NHL, while the 30 goals against rank 25th.
I'm not a fan of giving out letter grades to players, because the criteria are different and teams' records are often more or less than the sum of the individual parts. So instead of doing letter grades this time, I'm going to simply indicate whether I think the player has played up to the expectations his role on the team.
In today's blog, I'll look in-depth at Ilya Bryzgalov. Tomorrow, I'll run through the forwards and defensemen.
GOALTENDING -- Not meeting expectations
I was on the fence with this one. Despite a poor early won-loss record, Ilya Bryzgalov was the Flyers most consistently good player for the first three or four weeks of the season. Ever since then, he has been a very ordinary goaltender who has not been part of the solution. Ultimately, his .899 save percentage on the season is unacceptable, regardless of defensive breakdowns in front of him.
There haven't been a lot of games this season where Bryzgalov has truly been awful. There has not been an inordinate number of outright soft goals allowed, but the number of potentially stoppable shots that have gotten through (with Bryzgalov looking bad on the play) have increased. But over the last six weeks or so, there haven't been very many where he's been all that good, either.
I cover the Dallas Stars as well as the Flyers, and I can most assuredly tell you that the Dallas team defense is every bit as prone to horrific breakdowns as the Flyers, arguably even more so. Yet somehow Kari Lehtonen has still managed to be one of the top goaltenders in the NHL over the last few years, including a 2.23 GAA and .929 save percentage this year.
By comparison, Dallas backup goalies Richard Bachman (3.92 GAA, .848 save percentage in six appearances) and Cristopher Nilstorp (3.03 GAA, .897 SV% in five appearances) have been unable to make clutch saves and Bachman especially has compounded the problem with untimely soft goals. When one of those guys has been in net, it has become painfully clear just how vulnerable the Stars are defensively.
On many nights, Lehtonen singlehandedly lifts the Stars to a higher level of competitiveness. It CAN be done if a goalie is locked in. If Lehtonen can do it, Bryzgalov can as well. That is what the Flyers expect -- and need -- of Bryzgalov, and he doesn't even have to do it as frequently as Lehtonen does in Dallas.
Early in the season, Bryzgalov was doing just that. He kept games manageable, avoiding soft goals, erasing breakdowns at important junctures of the game and making his fair share of the tough saves. For the last month-plus, he hasn't.
It has gotten to the point where every time there is a breakaway or 2-on-1, the Flyers' best hope is for the attacking team to make a mistake because otherwise the next faceoff is going to be at center ice. Beyond those team-related issues, the bad rebounds have returned. The poor work on the stick side is back.
It's been disappointing to see after his strong start to the season. Is it unfair to hold Bryzgalov to a performance standard similar to Lehtonen's? I don't think it is. We're talking about a former Vezina finalist in Bryzgalov who is playing under a massive long-term contract to perform at the level he did early this season. But that level MUST be recovered and sustained for him to meet expectations.
As for the Flyers backups, Brian Boucher was his usual self (battling for all he's worth but not the answer in net) and Michael Leighton was awful in his lone appearance before getting injured, getting waived and then getting recalled. The lack of a reliable backup means that Bryzgalov will continue to get the vast majority of the playing time.
Tomorrow, I'll explain my individual ratings for the forwards and defensemen. For now, here's the short-form list.
MEETING EXPECTATIONS (FORWARDS): Jakub Voracek, Wayne Simmonds, Zac Rinaldo, Matt Read, Brayden Schenn, Ruslan Fedotenko, Tye McGinn.
NOT MEETING EXPECTATIONS (FORWARDS): Claude Giroux (harsh, but he has to be a top 5 player in NHL to meet the expectations placed on him), Scott Hartnell (injury but also a slow start), Danny Briere, Sean Couturier, Max Talbot, Mike Knuble.
SAMPLE SIZE TOO SMALL (FORWARDS): Simon Gagne
MEETING EXPECTATIONS (DEFENSE): Nicklas Grossmann, Luke Schenn
NOT MEETING EXPECTATIONS (DEFENSE): Kimmo Timonen (injuries likely the main reason), Braydon Coburn, Bruno Gervais, Erik Gustafsson (borderline case), Kurtis Foster
SAMPLE SIZE TOO SMALL (DEFENSE): Andrej Meszaros
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