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Before the Weather Gets Cold, the Flyers Have to Chill Out

October 30, 2018, 9:10 AM ET [7 Comments]
Jay Greenberg
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The Flyers have to figure out a way to get out of this the same way they got into it: Together.

You can round up all the usual suspects when things go bad–the coaching, the goaltending, the leadership. Or no goals in four games from Claude Giroux, the team’s highest-paid player; or one goal in five games from Wayne Simmonds or three goals in 11 games from Sean Couturier. Or, why not, just dump it all on the Trojan Horses–Andrew MacDonald and Jori Lehtera.

Indeed, we can go on and on and on through the roster-where is Brandon Manning when we need him?-until. . . Eureka! The real cause of Philadelphia being outscored 13-2 in the last three game on the way to a 4-7 record suddenly hits us like Tom Wilson from behind: Not one of the team’s top six forwards or top four defensemen are playing worth a damn.

Not a one. They are feeding off each other’s anxieties like Pat Falloon at a team buffet, trying harder to do it by themselves than even Ron Flockhart, and accomplishing less for their teammates than Mike York.

“We get down goals, we go into this hole where we’re not clicking, and we think the world is going to end,” said Shayne Gostisbehere. “We’ve got to get back to the basics, and the bounces will come.”

The media is running to Gostisbehere, an emergent truth teller, faster than the puck is leaving the defensive zone. The Flyers are coming through center ice in perfectly-synchronized one-man units, supporting each other on the ice like Jeremy Roenick once supported Roman Cechmanek after the goalie tried to quit in the middle of a game. The Flyers start each game with the dread of being behind 1-0 and, soon enough, they are.

They kept it simple for one game and won it because Jake Voracek made a terrific individual play to break a 2-2 slog with three-minutes remaining against a team, New Jersey that on that day was playing even worse. Then the Flyers started out against Colorado like the previous effort had exhausted them, got behind as usual, started to come on, sort of, gave the puck away on an Avalanche goal and promptly collapsed from the weight of their own apprehensions.

If we have seen this once in four decades of covering the NHL, we have seen in a million times, even in games Janne Niinimaa didn’t play in.

Paralysis by their own analysis. This is the year the Flyers finally have enough talent and experience to do some damage in the playoffs and they know it. Gotta get going! Yesterday, if not sooner!

“We have too much going on between our ears right now,” said Coach Dave Hakstol. “It’s my job to clear some of it out.”

His task begins with Ivan Provorov, the team rock on defense, who for two years seemed impervious to doubt, let along repeated 110 mile per hour slapshots to his ankles. Suddenly, inexplicably, a rock began this season playing like a basket case. Hard to figure. Harder to watch.

Couturier missed a lot of camp. Gostisbehere’s defensive play and sometimes his offensive play, too, meanders. MacDonald tried to come back too soon, and after Radko Gudas, who really has been the Flyers steadiest guy after a bad 2017-18, there are kids on this defense. They are big, talented, and most relevant to what we are talking about, in their early twenties.

Brian Elliott’s goaltending was fine last year until he got hurt in March. Rushed back for the playoffs, standing on one leg, Elliott then was not good enough for the Flyers to beat vulnerable Pittsburgh. As he keeps a seat warm for Carter Hart, Elliott has had one bad start out of eight-against Florida–and the Flyers pulled that one out.

Michal Neuvirth, the comeback player for any year, came in cold against the Isles Saturday and wasn’t so hot. But really, the rest of the team has not been good enough to put a supporting splint on any finger pointing at the goaltending, even if that is one of Philadelphia’s proudest traditions.

Back to more relevant problems: The reviews from Allentown on the work ethic of Mikhail Vorobyev, who started the season as another in a long line of placeholders at the third-center spot, were not good, and, sure enough, back to the farm he has gone to clean up his act or not. The penalty killing remains a bottom feeder and the fourth line is no better, other unaddressed ongoing issues. But the Flyers’ big off-season addition, James van Riemsdyk, has been out since the second game, a big hole in theories that GM Ron Hextall got sucked in by the Flyers’ March and April and did nothing to raise the talent an urgency levels.

No, the Flyers are stinking it up this badly because their best players aren’t doing nearly enough, as they aren’t in St. Louis, Los Angeles and wherever fans gather to panic on message boards before the frost is on the pumpkin, while Morgan Frost, all 180 pounds of him, remains in Sault Ste. Marie, tearing it up. Get him up here! He will save us!

We have been studying hockey slumps since 1974-75, when we covered the Kansas City Scouts and Lynn Powis went into one, wrecking their Stanley Cup hopes. They are pretty much all the same. Habits get a little sloppy for a game or two, when a team gets by regardless until it doesn’t anymore and then starts pressing as furiously as Don Cherry’s valet on his collars. It gets worse before it gets better, and, unless you are a really bad team, eventually becomes pretty much forgotten over the long, long season.

The 1985-86 Flames went 0-10-1 from mid December into January but went to that year’s finals and then won the Cup in 1989. The 2011-12 champion Kings suffered two separate losing streaks of five, costing Terry Murray his job, but they got it together in plenty of time.

Injuries often are a factor. Panic takes it from there. The Flyers went 10 games without winning last year to drop to 8-11-7, got out of town to beat the posse chasing Hakstol, and swept a Western Canada trip on the way to going 34-15-7 the rest of the way. Months later, Voracek revealed what turned it around: “We got drunk,” he said.

It can work. One of the rare times Mark Howe was struggling, Mike Keenan, the meanest coach there ever was, slipped the trainers $100 to go out with his star defenseman and get him right. Sometimes caring a little less produces a little more.

The Flyers repeated slow starts–in games and seasons–are annoying, and need to be addressed of course, now that roster has been improved to a point where expectations of a first playoff run since 2012 are reasonable. But we have seen too many of these fall stumbles out of the gate—coming off two Stanley Cup finals in three years, the 1987-88 Flyers were 6-13-3 before immediately running off a 12-0-2-to be appalled by them.

Under Hakstol, this same nucleus has twice rallied from bad starts to a playoff spot. And yeah, the bigger the hole, the more energy needs to be spent in March when it is best saved for April and May, but we’re not nearly at that point yet.

Rule of thumb while proven producers are playing with all thumbs: You don’t learn much about clubs either at their worst or at their red-hot best. Look for the real truths abut your team after it begins to play closer to its capabilities, as it almost inevitably does over the course of 82 games.
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