In the wake of yesterday afternoon's 6-1 trouncing the reeling Flyers received at the hands of a relentless Boston Bruins team, I did a lot of thinking about what goes into the making of losing streaks and ugly losses.
All teams experience adversity over the course of the season. Part of what separates top clubs from the pretenders -- almost as much as the collection of talent on the roster -- is their ability to pull things together and avoid the snowball effect that results in prolonged losing skids.
Anyone who has been paying close attention to the Flyers in recent weeks could have foreseen that the club was heading in the wrong direction even before its current 0-3-1 skid. Going into yesterday's game, there was a major risk that Philly was going to get its doors blown off by the Bruins.
Boston is a better team than Philadelphia. On merit, the defending Eastern Conference champion Bruins have won a Stanley Cup (2011), came within a whisker of another one last season and are a threat this year to once again be the team to come out of the East. The Bruins have a balanced roster with no glaring weaknesses. They don't often self-destruct.
However, that's not really what matters. On any given day or night, any club in the NHL can beat any other club. For instance, the Pittsburgh Penguins are a significantly better hockey team than the Dallas Stars, but it was the Stars who skated away with a 3-0 win yesterday.
Rather, the main reason why the Flyers were ripe to get massacred by Boston is the inverse of why the Stars were in position to topple the Penguins: one club (Dallas) was climbing to the summit of its game and the other (Philly) was careening into the valley.
After yesterday's game, I asked Flyers head coach Craig Berube if he felt that bad habits had taken root at the time the team was compiling its franchise-record matching nine third period comeback wins from Nov. 30 to Jan. 18.
“No, I don’t think they are bad habits," said Berube. "I think it’s a confidence thing where it doesn’t look like we want the puck. The support’s not there, the team support is not there and the team play is not there. To me, when that happens, that’s confidence. I’ve seen it my whole career.”
I respectfully disagree with the coach. Team confidence doesn't appear or disappear just like that. It starts with habits, results and repetition.
I have always strongly believed that losing streaks are born of the bad habits that teams get into BEFORE the losses start to pile up. The reverse is also true. The foundation for winning streaks is often built from areas of improvement shown in the latter games of stretches of losing streaks.
Again, I'll use Dallas as an example, before turning back to the Flyers.
In late December, the Stars were missing half of their starting blueline -- which was and still is regarded as a suspect collection of players even when fully intact (sound familiar, Flyers fans?). Nevertheless, the Stars reeled off a seven-game point streak (5-0-2) at the end of the calendar year.
Why did that happen? Lindy Ruff's team displayed a teamwide commitment to defense, and puck support. Along with strong goaltending from Kari Lehtonen, that was how the club was able to overcome the absence of three veteran starters (Stephane Robidas, Trevor Daley and Sergei Gonchar) from the blueline and outscore opponents by 23-13 margin.
Dallas did not allow more than two goals in regulation in any of the games during the streak. However, over the final couple games of that stretch, the goaltending and a bit of good puck luck was masking an increasing number of turnovers and coverage mixups.
When the calendar flipped to January, the Stars' fell and fell hard.
The Stars lost six games in a row in regulation and started the month with a horrid 1-8-1 record. Dallas scored more than two goals just in a seven-game span and yielded three or more regulation or overtime goals in seven of eight games in one stretch. Even as both Daley and Gonchar returned to the lineup, the club could not stop the bleeding.
Slowly -- too slowly, in fact, because the 1-8-1 stretch dug a deep hole -- the Stars started to come out of it. Over several of the latter games, there were stretches of good play but they weren't sustained, and the end result wasn't there. They had a game in Minnesota on Jan. 18 where they actually played a pretty solid game for about 45 to 50 minutes but still left with a 3-2 overtime loss after battling back from a 2-1 deficit in the third period.
Dallas was able to take the areas of improvement from that game, continue to work on things in practice and, after absorbing one more loss (against Nashville), they have reeled off three straight wins.
First, Dallas dominated a home rematch against Minnesota in a 4-0 whitewashing that was actually more lopsided than the final score. Then they ended a Toronto Maple Leafs' six-game winning streak with a 7-1 rout. By last night, the confidence was surging and they beat Pittsburgh, 3-0.
Now the Stars have a three-game winning streak, a 14-1 overall goal differential and two shutouts. It didn't just magically materialize.
What does any of this have to do with the Flyers, you ask? Plenty. The process is the same. Repair the cracks in the foundation and build from there.
If you look back to where the Flyers were after the dismissal of Peter Laviolette and their own 1-7-0 (and then 3-9-0) start to the season, what did Berube and his coaching staff do?
They put a heavy emphasis on players' thinking faster and working smarter, keeping their feet moving, making crisper and higher-percentage passing and maintaining consistent puck support (third forward high in defensive zone, close D-to-forward gap, everyone backchecks, etc.). It did NOT seep in during a single practice or game, but if you were paying attention, there were signs of progress.
As a matter of fact, the team's main problem at the time was an inability to score goals. The team actually had one of the NHL's lowest goals against averages in the first quarter of the season. By mid-November, the club pulled everything together with a 6-0-1 run.
Over that span, the Flyers -- with the same forward personnel, goaltenders and much-maligned blueline -- did not allow more than two regulation goals in any game. At one point, they went five-plus games without giving up a single even-strength goal. So, yes, this group CAN play team defense and see positive results when they set their minds to it.
Some people have said things such as, "Well, the 6-0-1 run was nice but they played a bunch of weak teams."
Not true. Yes, the first win came against a struggling Edmonton Oilers team and there was a win over Buffalo in the mix. However, the Flyers also beat some quality opposition.
For instance, after beating the Oilers for the first win of the streak, Philly played a virtually perfect 60 minutes of road hockey and trounced Ottawa by a 5-0 score. Ottawa had brought a three-game winning streak into that match, and the Flyers dominated them from the start to finish.
The next night, the Flyers gritted out a 2-1 road win over the Pittsburgh Penguins. Those were the very same Penguins that had kicked the Flyers' butts at the Wells Fargo Center back in Oct. It is true that it took a stellar game from Ray Emery to beat the Pens, but last time I checked, good goaltending was more often than not a rather important part of playing winning hockey.
From there, the Flyers rode a wave of success for awhile. The constants at the time were the goaltending and the greatly improved -- not flawless, but markedly better -- commitment to tenets that Berube and his staff instilled.
In the weeks since then, there has been an erosion of those traits. The increase in goal scoring and the team's incredible run of comeback wins masked it, but it was lurking just beneath the surface.
If people were curious why Berube seemed so peeved and standoffish after the Flyers' 6-4 comeback win against the Islanders last Saturday, the last four games have shown why the coach was unhappy. Whether he'd ever publicly admit it or not, the Flyers were already well on their way to their current losing streak.
In yesterday's game, the bad penalties started quickly. The Flyers got back into chase-the-game mode, players pressed and Bruins methodically picked them apart. It was dreadful to watch, and there was not a single aspect of the game where the Flyers could take anything positive away.
Hopefully, the eye-opener is that they played a good team in a measuring stick game and they came up like Sky Low Low standing next to Andre the Giant. That and the fact that, if the season ended today, the Flyers would be out of the playoffs.
Today, the Flyers will hold a 10 a.m. practice at the Skate Zone in Voorhees, prior to heading over to the Wells Fargo Center for the annual Wives Carnival. Nothing they do today will be a magical elixir. Rather, the aim is to start resetting the foundation. Playing game right and getting results breeds confidence, and that confidence feeds into repetition.
One piece of that puzzle, by the way, is to go back and watch video of what the team was doing right back in November. Generate some positive inspiration along with the realism of addressing the flaws that are evident on the ice. Dwelling solely on negativity is counter-productive at times like these.
Confidence doesn't appear out of thin air or disappear into a vacuum. With a very tough slate of games upcoming, the team has a lot of work to do to give themselves a chance to get back on the winning track.
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PESSIMISM VERSUS REALISM
One thing the Flyers should NOT do is bother themselves too much with what anyone outside the locker room says or thinks. For one thing, they are the only ones who can pull themselves out of it. A trade or other roster move won't magically fix everything, either.
As far as lineup changes go, there is a reason why Steve Downie, Andrej Meszaros and Erik Gustafsson have been in and out of the lineup and Craig Berube has not shown trust or patience with them.
People talk about the accountability issue: specifically, why some players end up with their ice times cut or on the scratch list and why others have stayed in the lineup despite similar on-ice mistakes and bad penalties (especially of late).
This is a fair question, and I agree with the criticisms to a certain extent. In Meszaros' case, a recent offensive hot streak was not enough to save his spot in the lineup yesterday against Boston. While it is true that Meszaros has had ongoing defensive issues, it is equally true that defensive defenseman Nicklas Grossmann and Luke Schenn have had similar own-zone problems (recently with Grossmann and for the majority of the season with Schenn).
So I do see a point to some of the questions that have been raised. However, I will say that I strongly suspect that Berube and his staff -- none of whom shrink away from telling it like it is to a player -- have made clear to other players who continue to stay in the lineup that there is not an endless amount of patience. The ones who get less patience have earned less patience for the most part.
As far as fan criticism goes, there are many fans who raise intelligent questions. There are just as many who either flat out don't know the game very well or get overly emotional and lose sight of the inevitable ebbs and flows of a season -- especially for the many teams that are on the playoff bubble. That is what these current Flyers are.
Some of the same people who want to tear away at certain players and coaches who've been around the game all of their lives are the same ones who demonstrated their Hockey 101 knowledge yesterday as they oohed and aahed their disappointment over a play where Scott Hartnell was 10 feet offside and Claude Giroux fired the puck from the neutral zone with Boston goaltender Tuukka Rask way out of his net. Of course, even if the puck had gone into the net, the goal would not have counted.
The truth of the matter is that a segment of the fan base, especially in Philadelphia, thrives much more on negativity than success. That's why the radio talk shows and internet message boards get much busier when the team is losing that when it's winning. That's why it's almost predictable that certain folks will come out of the woodwork when there's a losing streak and then won't utter a peep of praise during the good stretches.
If anything, they mostly take a doomsday outlook that every win is an illusion, a fluke or a deck stacked in the team's favor, and every loss is the real team (especially the ugliest losses).
You also see in the criticism of individual players who are struggling. The criticisms go way overboard. Take the case of Grossmann. He has had an awful month of January -- quite possibly the worst month of his NHL career (and I watched him game-in and game-out in Dallas as well as for the Flyers). But the big picture is that he's still a capable and competent NHL defenseman who has generally done a good job of filling his role for the Flyers.
A final point related to defensemen in general: There are several franchise-level defensemen in the game. Below them, there is a slightly larger number of players who fall just below the elite level. However, there really isn't a big difference among the vast majority of veteran and young veteran defensemen in the NHL.
It's more about how the personnel is mixed and matched, with a role fit to the system than it is about them being bonafide players in the league. You don't GET to be a veteran in the NHL if you can't fill a certain role effectively.
It would be wonderful if the Flyers had a franchise player like Shea Weber atop their blueline plus a mobile, two-way puck mover who can play in either of the top two pairings. Alas they don't.
They have an aging Kimmo Timonen, Braydon Coburn as their most mobile back and a collection of role-playing D-men with different singular specialties (all capable of performing their given role effectively if they have the right partner to balance them off). Goaltenders may have hockey's toughest job but defensemen aren't far behind, and their work is more thankless because it only stands out to some when mistakes happen.
The Flyers have to work with what they have.
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CARNIVAL SUNDAY
The annual Flyers Wives Fight for Lives Carnival will be held today at the Wells Fargo Center. As one of the attractions, the living members of the 1974 and 1975 Stanley Cup winning teams will be gathered as part of their weekend reunion.
During the first intermission of yesterday's game, I had the opportunity to interview Tom Bladon, Andre "Moose" Dupont, Terry Crisp and Reggie Leach. As someone who grew up idolizing the Broad Street Bullies, it was a huge thrill for me.
I will talk more about that in the second section of tomorrow's Musings.
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