FLYERS IMPROVEMENTS NEED TO START AT EVEN STRENGTH
When pundits talk about the keys to success in hockey, much of the focus is inevitably placed on goaltending and special teams. That's especially true in the playoffs. While these are undeniably vital areas for a hockey club, teamwide five-on-five play is a better predictor of how far a team is likely to go in the postseason presuming it receives reasonably solid goaltending.
Take a look at the NHL's
five-on-five goal ratio rankings for the regular season. What do you see? What I see is this:
1) Sixteen teams make the Stanley Cup playoffs. Of the 16 teams that reached the 2014 postseason, 15 ranked in the top 16 NHL clubs in five-on-five goal ratio. Only the Flyers (17th overall at five-on-five) are not represented. Phoenix, ranked 15th, missed the playoffs.
2) Among the eight teams that went on to advance to the second round of the playoffs, seven of the eight ranked higher than their first-round opponent in even-strength goal differential during the regular season. The one outlier was Montreal (ranked 16th) sweeping Tampa Bay (ranked 7th).
3) Within the actual eight first-round playoff series themselves, six saw team with a
superior five-on-five goal ratio prevail in the series. One series (Los Angeles vs. San Jose) ended up with an equal number of even-strength goals scored in the series. Only Anaheim advanced despite being very slightly outscored by Dallas at even strength in the series.
Teams that over-rely on their special teams to lift them tend to be the clubs that are more prone to inconsistency and the much-cited "lack of 60-minute performance." The Flyers are a good case in point.
A Step forward, but not far enough
What happened during the lockout-shortened 2012-13 season? The team had the highest combined special teams ratio of any club in the NHL. Nevertheless, Philly missed the playoffs by a significant margin.
Why? Poor five-on-five play. The Flyers ranked 25th of the NHL's 30 teams at full strength last season. That doomed them to miss the postseason despite their impressive special teams rankings.
Now take a look at the 2013-14 season. The Flyers' 17th-place ranking at even strength was a nice step up from the previous year and the club actually improved at five-on-five as the year progressed. Philly ranked near the bottom the NHL early on and pulled themselves up near the middle of the pack by the end. It was a step in the right direction.
However, in the first round of the playoffs, Philly once again ran into even strength problems against a Rangers' team that ranked 10th in the NHL in five-on-five goal ratio during the regular season.
Of the eight series played in the first round of the playoffs, only the Boston Bruins fared better on the power play and penalty kill than Philly. What's more, the Flyers received stellar goaltending from Steve Mason in Games Four, Six and Seven against the New York Rangers after getting solid play from Ray Emery in Games One and Two.
Nevertheless, the Flyers lost the series in seven games. Why? It all started with even-strength play, where the Flyers had the worst five-on-five goals for/against ratio of any of the eight teams in the first round of the playoffs.
Even the very best power plays and penalty kills (to a slightly lesser extent) tend to run hot and run cold over the course of any given season or playoffs. With the Flyers at such a steep five-on-five disadvantage in the majority of their series with the Rangers, they had to rely on their power play to offset that disadvantage while also being virtually flawless on the penalty kill, especially as the more heavily penalized team.
In the games where the Flyers' power play clicked (Games Two, Four and Six), they won. In the games in which Philly's power play was frustrated (Games Three, Five and Seven), they lost.
Game One was almost entirely played at five-on-five until Jason Akeson's fateful high sticking double-minor in the third period. New York wore the Flyers down at five-on-five. The score remained tied at 1-1 until the Rangers' power play cashed in on both ends of the Akeson penalty.
Thereafter, the Flyers gave in to frustration and took a slew of penalties late in the game as New York ended up with a 6-to-1 advantage in power plays. Carl Hagelin added an extra insurance goal at even strength to create a 4-1 final.
New York scored on three of its first eight power plays in the series. Thereafter, the Flyers killed off each of the next 21 Blueshirt advantages. That went a long way toward enabling the Flyers to be able to take the Rangers to the full seven games.
In the end, Philly's superior special teams and goaltending play brought them to the brink of knocking off New York. The Flyers just couldn't get enough five-on-five push to take them over the top and win the series.
Despite all the media focus on power plays, the Rangers won the series because they were the better even strength team. That is far more often than not how it goes in hockey.
Three keys to continued five-on-five improvement
I have said this before and will say it again: Five-on-five success can be achieved in many different ways. It's about team play and puck support and most certainly about players keeping their feet moving (even if they lack blazing speed).
It would certainly be nice if the Flyers could add a little more speed to the lineup during the offseason, both up front and on the blueline. Today's NHL places a premium on big players who can also skate well. That is not to say that a player cannot compensate in other ways if he lacks one attribute or the other, but it is ideal to have both brawn and speed.
Inevitably, when people focus on the Flyers' skating, it is the defense corps that gets scrutinized. I would argue that it is easier to compensate for lack of blueline speed than it is for average-to-below-average speed in the forward corps. With defensemen, it's more important to make a good first pass and to be positionally sound than it is to skate like the wind.
The final trait is certainly nice to have, too. However, a fast defensemen who constantly gets outmuscled is just as much of a trade-off as a big and strong defender who lacks speed and is in trouble if he can't get an angle on an attacker. Ultimately, successful teams need a blend of puck movers and reliable stay-at-home defenders.
Flyers general manager Paul Holmgren said it best yesterday: The puck can move faster than any player can skate. That is why Craig Berube constantly hammered on players thinking faster, reacting faster and keeping their feet moving.
With that said, there is only so much a team can do if it is has average to below average speed on a teamwide basis. The Flyers constantly insist they are not a "slow" team. The truth of the matter is that they have some plus skaters and some savvy skaters. When they execute Berube's system, they stay in motion and fare OK.
Nevertheless, the Rangers and many other clubs have a superior individual collection of skaters and tend to be more consistent in the skating department on a teamwide basis as well. Therein lies the root cause of Philly's inconsistency in five-on-five play; they have to work MUCH harder on a teamwide level to compensate because there aren't many Flyers players who can just turn on the afterburners.
Over the course of the season, the Flyers displayed above-average scoring depth up front and got over 30 goals from the defense as well. The latter carried over to the postseason, as Philly got four goals from defensemen; two at five-on-five, one at four-on-four and one on a delayed penalty that created a six-on-five attack. Unfortunately, the forwards really didn't hold up their end of the bargain.
VIEWS FROM THE INSIDE
At yesterday's breakup day in Voorhees, there were many questions asked by the media about how the club can improve at five-on-five going forward. Actually, I made that my first line of questioning to anyone who had not already addressed related questions from other attending media members.
It is always interesting to collect a variety of viewpoints on crucial team-related topics. The following interview excerpts were culled from the transcriptions issued by the Flyers' public relations staff.
Kimmo Timonen
* "Special teams were great but 5-on-5, we need to get faster and quicker. I think they were just a little better on 5-on-5 and when I say that, they were a little quicker team and that’s what we have to do to get better.”
* "I think it means you have to, in the summer, actually get faster. You can work out and come to camp in good shape and try to get faster but I think it’s the way we play too. We can get faster and I think everyone knows that.”
* "I like our team. I like the team moving forward because we can get some young guys, young forwards, who can be faster, I won’t get any younger, that’s for sure, and probably not faster but I feel like I can still help the team."
Wayne Simmonds
* “I think we’ve just got to work better together as a five man unit. We’ve got to make sure we have better spacing, we’ve got more support on the puck, and I think from there we will get better. I think we got better gradually as the year went along and obviously we want to keep working towards that next season.”
Craig Berube
* "This year I thought we became a faster team, a more puck-oriented team that got on the forecheck, but we kept the puck a lot more and made a lot more plays coming out of our end. I think that we want to keep the puck. We want to be a puck-oriented team, but at the same time we need to get better without the puck. I think we can check better than we have. I want to get our team to where we don’t have the puck, we’re going to put puck pressure on and get it back. We can be better defensively. "
* "We did get faster [over the season], but we’ve got to get faster. It’s about playing faster more than the players, I’d say. I think we can play a faster game with and without the puck. I think we did get faster with and without the puck and we got to a certain level… not good enough though. We’ve got to get better."
* "These guys need to take the summer and get in extremely good shape, and get faster. Come to camp ready to go, and we’re going to get going here right away and get the systems in, get the work in that’s needed to get off to a good start to the season."
* " I thought we got better over the year. We ended up taking too many penalties in some of the games in the playoffs. Overall I think our discipline is better, I think our players are getting it, getting more disciplined. [If] we get quicker as a team, that’ll cut down on penalties for sure."
Paul Holmgren
* "We need to continue to get bigger, stronger, faster throughout the organization. We need more depth in the organization. Obviously we have a couple vehicles coming up in the summer where we can improve – through the draft, by hitting on those areas, and in free agency – whether we get involved in that or not, we’ll see."
* "Is Braydon Coburn not a good skater? To me, he’s one of the better skaters in the league. Andrew MacDonald is a good skater. Nicklas Grossmann skates okay. Erik Gustafson skates okay. Do we have enough? You can probably always use more. To me it’s all about puck movement and execution which makes a fast team. The puck moves faster than any players. At times in this series we looked relatively good coming out of our end with good, quick puck movement where we caught the forwards at the right time and we could escape their forecheck pressure. And then at times things slowed down."
* "A good example in Game 7 was Coburn came around the back of the net, had one hand on the stick, and passed it to Brayden who was in the middle of the ice open and it was a pass that hit him in the skate and the next thing you know Rick Nash is coming down on a breakaway. So that’s the execution part that at times we weren’t very good at in that series. I give the Rangers credit, but I think our execution, even on the last stretch of the season after we had the difficult stretch at home and we had some success, we stumbled along a little bit for whatever reason.”
INDIVIDUAL SKATING EVALUATIONS
Keeping in mind that team play and puck support is more important than individual speed, if I were to categorize the Flyers' current regulars by their own skating ability, I would describe them this way:
FORWARDS
Claude Giroux: The team's best player is neither big nor blazingly fast in a straight line. What he is, though, is supremely skilled with the puck and crafty on his skates. That is more important than pure speed. Even before you consider all the intangibles this player brings, I'd gladly take Giroux's shiftiness and puck savvy over an Alexandre Daigle type who could fly but was too easy to take off the puck when it mattered most.
Jakub Voracek: Voracek is the complete package as a skater. He can go north-south with plus speed and can also either cut his way in the inside with power or go wide with finesse. Add that to his puckhandling skills and you have the player who was arguably the one New York had the toughest time defending one-on-one as they focused heavily on checking Giroux as tightly as possible.
Scott Hartnell: The "Hartnell Down" jokes aren't funny when the power forward randomly tumbles to the ice at an inopportune time. He is not the slowest power forward I have ever seen by any means. He's not a late-career Kevin Stevens, for instance. However, Hartnell's bad balance and tendency to get out of position at times and not recover is one of the occasional trouble spots in his game.
Brayden Schenn: Schenn is an average skater, which means that he has to play a hard-on-the-puck game to compensate. When he does that and gets to the net, he's effective. He has yet to do that with enough consistency in his career.
Wayne Simmonds: The lanky power forward has decent wheels as well as being remarkably strong for someone who looks so skinny. He is not a great puckhandler but he wins a lot of battles and is fearless around the net. Simmonds took several maintenance days late in the season. Although the player downplayed any significant late-season injuries when asked yesterday, Holmgren said Simmonds may have a knee issue. The problem did not sound like a major problem that would definitely require surgery, however.
Vincent Lecavalier: Even before the back problems he suffered in December, Lecavalier was a below-average skater. He's a big and strong guy but is primarily a finesse player who still has good offensive instincts. Lecavalier often seemed to have trouble with the pace of play and was at his most effective in stationary situations, where he could blast power play one-timers from the right side or when he could slide near the right post and collect a puck. The more he had to skate, the more he struggled.
Sean Couturier: Lack of speed is the biggest weakness in Couturier's game. He has added muscle to his big frame, however. Hockey sense is still his best attribute. His defensive game is still ahead of his offensive game at the NHL level. It was revealed yesterday that Couturier played much of the second half of the season with a suspected sports hernia, but the injury did not progress to the point where he had to be shut down.
Matt Read: The versatile and game -- but undersized -- forward is one of the Flyers' fastest skaters with and without the puck. I think he got away from his game a bit in the Rangers series and over-focused a bit on hitting. It's commendable for Read to finish his checks when there's an opportunity to do so. However, when Matt Read leads the team in hits through the first five games of a playoff series and only has a couple of sequences where his speed stands out, he's gone a bit off his game.
Steve Downie: Ineffective play and medical issues -- ranging from concussion symptoms to worsening hearing problems that required surgery on both ears -- will probably spell the end of Downie's second stint in Philadelphia as he hits unrestricted free agency this summer. Downie isn't big and he isn't fast so he has to play a tasmanian devil style of perpetual motion to outwork opponents and get under their skin in order to be effective. Once he started having concussion issues, Downie stopped winning the puck battles he needed to win. For a short stretch of a time, mostly over the span of a few weeks between his first and second concussions of this season, Downie was a boon to the lineup. The rest of the time, he was a non-factor or a penalty liability without enough positives to justify the risk.
Michael Raffl: A good skater with a little bit of grit added to the mix. Raffl showed himself to be a reliable two-way player, although he lacked finishing ability. This season marked the first time the Austrian rookie had ever played such a lengthy schedule.
Zac Rinaldo: The sometimes controversial winger skates well and hits aggressively. He lacks puck skills in game situations. The team briefly experimented with him as a secondary penalty killer, as Rinaldo has expressed interest for years in contributing in that area and assistant coach Ian Laperriere has been working with him to be able to do so. Rinaldo wasn't quite where he needed to be so the experiment was short-lived this season but may be re-visited in the future.
Adam Hall: Hall is big, strong and smart. He's also one the team's slowest forwards. Hall is a good penalty killer, strong on faceoffs and has hockey sense. That's how he stayed in Craig Berube's lineup.
Jay Rosehill: An old-school-style enforcer and a hard worker. Not much of a skater.
DEFENSEMEN
Kimmo Timonen: Timonen gets by on his guile, puck skills and competitiveness nowadays, as well as still being pretty good on the power play. He is strong pound-for-pound but is almost always at a size disadvantage. As a younger player, he was a slightly above-average skater. As he's aged, he's lost a full stride and is now a below-average skater from a speed standpoint. He still takes good angles most of the time and his hockey sense is very high. Timonen is also still a good breakout passer.
Braydon Coburn: I will talk more about Coburn in an upcoming blog. He is not a superstar by any means, but he's an above-average NHL defender if you charted every regular defenseman in the entire NHL. Why? It's because Coburn is exceptionally mobile for such a big-framed player and is durable enough to absorb a lot of minutes. He is inconsistent at times with and without the puck but when he keeps his game relatively simple, he's fine. Coburn struggled in most of the games the Flyers lost in the Rangers series but did play an important part in helping the team preserve one-goal leads in the third periods of Games Two and Four. Those were his two best periods of the series. He needed more like them than he generated.
Mark Streit: Streit is not as good as Timonen in terms of positional defense but they are similar players in a lot of other ways. On the downside, that includes being an undersized defenseman who is not particularly fast. On the positive, he is a fine breakout passer and has a lot of guile. I thought Streit played well all around after the Olympic break and was actually the Flyers' best two-way defenseman in the Rangers series.
Nicklas Grossmann: When he was just starting out his career in Dallas, Grossmann had underrated skating ability for a player his size. Nowadays, although he's still only 29, he's slow. Grossmann wears braces on both knees and just suffered an serious ankle injury in the Rangers series. He gets backed into the defensive zone when opponents generate speed through the neutral zone but he usually plays his angles well. Grossmann does NOT get beaten wide very often. In close quarters, he is one of the team's most effective defenders. When the gap control is good, he's fine. When there's too much of gap, he's in trouble. Grossmann sometimes struggles to make the first pass, but is adequate if there's a short-range safety valve. For all the talk of the Rangers' speed advantage in the playoffs, Grossmann was not out for a single New York even-strength goal and was part of the team's penalty killing success until he suffered his season ending injury in Game Four.
Andrew MacDonald: MacDonald is a plus skater and minutes eater as well as being the NHL's top shot blocker. Despite being a durable defender, he is rather slightly built. MacDonald was very banged up late in the season, taking frequent maintenance days and being rested in the regular season finale. He struggled in the majority of the Rangers series. MacDonald was noticeably not skating up to his usual standard in the New York series, and that definitely increased his vulnerability to the forecheck as he retrieved pucks.
Luke Schenn: Schenn is not a fast skater but he is big and strong. He has a tendency to get out of position and is sometimes prone to losing his angle and getting beaten wide. He makes an underrated first pass.
Erik Gustafsson: Gustafsson is a good but not exceptional skater for an undersized defenseman. When he moves his feet and hones in on moving the puck quickly, he's effective. He did that in Game Six. When he gets stationary and gets outmuscled frequently, as he did at times in Game Seven, he is not very effective.
Hal Gill: Gill's game is size and savvy. He is one of the NHL's slowest skaters at any position.
GOALTENDERS
Steve Mason: Goaltenders' skating ability is an often overlooked area. Mason is a plus-skating goaltender to go along with his elite-caliber puckhandling ability. He is quick in getting to the trapezoid and getting back to his net. Mason also goes post-to-post well.
Ray Emery: Emery is a battler and has gained a lot of savvy over the years. His career-threatening hip injury took away the mobility he had as a young goaltender. Nowadays, he relies heavily on anticipation. Side-to-side movement is his most exploitable area of weakness, and that's how the Rangers scored most of their goals early in the series.
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