MONDAY QUICK HITS
* The Tampa Bay Lightning and New York Rangers are two clubs that, no matter how well the Flyers are playing leading up games against those teams, always give Philly trouble. Therefore, it was not surprising -- but it was disappointing -- that Philly lost both ends of their weekend back-to-back games with those two teams.
In Sunday's 4-1 loss in New York, the Flyers simply dug themselves too deep of a hole early in the game. Defensively, they couldn't handle the Rangers' aggressive forechecking in the first half of the opening period. In the meantime, Philly got mediocre goaltending from Ray Emery, who came up small on two of the Rangers' three goals in the opening period.
The Flyers have been an outstanding comeback team over the last six weeks, but they couldn't make headway against Henrik Lundqvist and company, despite abundant chances. There are games where a goalie is made to look better than he played and ones where the goalie has to earn his saves. For the former Vezina winner, last night's performance fell in the latter category.
Lundqvist fought off a lot of screens and several deflections. His rebound control was outstanding. In short, it was a vintage performance from the Rangers' goaltender in preventing the Flyers from getting a foothold in climbing the comeback hill. The Rangers' defense blocked 14 shots and the Flyers missed the net on seven others but Lundqvist truly had to work for many of the 37 saves he made.
After the disastrous first 10 minutes of the first period, the Flyers buckled down and played fairly well -- although they took some ill-timed penalties -- the rest of the way. It still wasn't nearly enough to overcome the horrific start to the game.
The Rangers made it 4-0 and broke the Flyers' string of consecutive penalty kills on a puck that bounced in off Braydon Coburn. Mark Streit got the Flyers on the board at 6:49 of the third period on a power play point shot through traffic in front of Lundqvist.
* Former Flyers winger Dan Carcillo scored the Rangers' first goal on a play where Mark Streit got beaten behind the net and Emery neither tracked the puck nor moved very well to get over as Carcillo came out from behind the net.
Later in the game, Carcillo fought Luke Schenn. The bigger and stronger Schenn got the better of the long fight, in my opinion. Carcillo then kept up a running trash-talk battle with Wayne Simmonds and others and got involved in an altercation in the final 11 seconds of the game.
In short, last night the Rangers got the "good Carcillo": a game where he drives an opponent to distraction and also plays effectively from a hockey standpoint. That is what he needs to do to stay in the Blueshirts' lineup for the long haul.
The player's past history is that the "bad Carcillo" nights will inevitably start to outnumber the good ones at some point. Eventually, he becomes more of a hindrance than a help to his own team, because he has zero ability to control his temper and no semblance of playing with discipline (making him perhaps the easiest player in the NHL to goad into bad penalties despite his 360-plus games of experience at the top level).
The reason why Carcillo stays in the NHL is that the guy can play a bit on top of his physical aggressiveness. The reason why he's now in his sixth NHL organization at age 28 is that he's never learned how to channel his emotions properly for the long haul.
* Nicklas Grossmann is a good NHL defenseman. For much of his Flyers tenure, he's been a set-and-forget type of defensive defenseman from whom you know what you'll get virtually every game. He knows how to maximize his strengths and play around his limitations.
With that said, Grossmann had a horrific weekend against the Lightning and Rangers. He had an awful turnover that led to a goal against the Bolts. He ran around out of position on another Tampa goal. Last night, he lost a battle on the walls to the much smaller Mats Zuccarello. He also took a couple penalties, including one that resulted in the Rangers' fourth goal of the game.
When all was said and done, Grossmann was out for five even-strength goals against in the two games, including three where he was partially at fault. It doesn't get much rougher than that.
Oddly enough, I thought Grossmann had played two excellent games in the Flyers' wins over New Jersey and Montreal heading into the weekend. I am not in favor of scratching him, but I will say that he needs to be much, much better than he was against both the Lightning and Rangers.
* Flyers defense prospect Shayne Gostisbehere had to leave Union College's game on Saturday with a lower-body injury. He attempted to skate one more shift but was unable to continue in the game. He was slated to be re-evaluated yesterday or two, according to Ken Schott.
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