Best Of Three: Flyers hold off frustrated Blackhawks, head to Chicago tied at 2-2

I had thought that, but there’s no way Leino is that flipping awesome, is there?

He said after the game that he got lucky. Missed the shot, got the bounce off of Versteeg’s back.

No Fly Bys on the weekend, but good job directing people to it.

Link: http://www.habseyesontheprize.com/2010/6/3/1500429/the-giroux-fischer-fiasco-did-this

P.K. Subban has the talent to become an all star.

Really?

Jesus I guess they went all Steinbrenner

You can’t have any alcohol shipped to PA—it sucks.

Most unlikely? Definitely. Greatest? I think that would have to go to the 2008 Phillies for breaking the combined 100 season championship drought.

Wow…. I didn’t come along until May of last year, but wow, can you imagine if one of the guys still had to tally up the post counts like that every thread? My goodness…..

I have no idea how that link got messed up, but so it goes. Game Thread Roll Call for those who are curious about the good ol’ days.

haha, I remember the contest to see who can have the most posts!

I lost…

We can actually still do this. There’s a script we can run that adds up everybody’s post totals in one click. Spits out a table, too. Maybe we’ll start it at the beginning of next season and do a contest or something.

Yeah, a little. Lappy too possibly. They may just be playing a good line who are quick as they are too the puck. Most of the Hawks are. They seem to be holding their own most of the time

game 4 was a dramatic foil to game 2.

Its the same thing as in the Boston series. There was always something in the back of my mind that said we can still win this because the games were mostly very close. We just needed a few more bounces to go our way.

People also forget he’s got alot of truck for a 6’3 200lb man.

Q constantly changes lines during games, especially when the Hawks are down. It’s a love/hate thing in Chicago when he does this. Also, Q will typically move Hossa up to the 1st line in certain situations, for example, the last minute of a period. It definitely was not anything but a temporary move since Hossa and Kane play the same position.

We actually have the Coach Q’s Deterministic Chaos Creator Line Generator over at SCH to try to determine what Q’s lines will be game to game. Take a spin:
http://paching.net/mike/sch/hawkslinegen.html

my god that was annoying the crap out of me. He’s been known to do that on past teams he had, and he’s done it much to our frustration during bad spells during the regular season instead of letting certain guys develop chemistry. that’s why SCH has the running joke of Q’s “random line generator”…b/c that’s sometimes what it feels like, press a button and see what gets spit out.

The D shuffling is what’s really killed us last game. you are completely right.

partial payback for 1997 – they still owe us a D-man for the last 2 games of the s****p

Wouldn’t have happened if not for a great effort by JVR

omg I think it just sunk in.

I don’t know about you but Giroux was so stealth camping behind the net I feel like Scotty just beamed him there from the bench and no one had any idea.

He played 2:12 in the 3rd, but didn’t see the ice in the last 13:31 until after Carter got the empty net.

Cool, thanks I’ll watch it. Had to miss the game due to a 13-hour workday :(
But anyway… GO FLYERS!!!!!!!!!!!!

10:46

actually, most of the comments i read were bitching about pronger and the refs.

a Sampling of Pre-Series comments from SCH (T-1 Day from Game)

they sound like they are more then capable of…. stopping Buff, out-muscling Hossa, out skate Keith, pin down Kane, make Toews second guess himself, …….

And they all scare me. As was pointed out the 2 way guys are up top and as long as our D can keep the other lines somewhat at bay our forwards should be able to put some chances on Leighton. Regardless, the Flyers have plenty of firepower, time to get all nervous again!

Officially scared that we might lose this

The performance I was most impressed with was the Jersey series. I think with Krecji and Sturm in the lineup you would have have had difficulty getting the 4 wins in a row against Boston. Also, the Halak you saw was not the Halak that Was an Pit saw.

There are things you could say about our road here, too—the challenged Preds, the brainless Canucks, the disappearing act of San Jose.

I don’t know, it’s one of the reasons—for me anyway—that this series doesn’t look to be like a traditional 112 point team vs 88 point team match-up. It has more the feel of a Carolin-Edmonton or a Tampa-Calgary final.

That’s why people watch sports. If it was certain we’d win this thing based on placement and the fact that no 7th seed has ever won, fewer people would watch. Sure we play in a stronger conference and have beaten tougher opponents, but Philly wasn’t really healthy up until now (hell, they’re still not 100%). People might disagree but I’d say they’re probably a 4th seed in disguise.

I do think the Hawks have an upper hand in most areas and with the style of game Philly likes to play, it should work in our favor. But you can never quite be sure what will happen.

(Though I agree, the more you analyze the opposition, the more paranoid you get)

although Philly played against some weak offenses, they played against some of the best defenses around.

I’m not expecting a goalies series. I am however predicting heartburn for this vegetarian…

Any team that is captained by Mike Richards will wear their heart on their sleeve and leave their soul on the ice. The Flyers have already shown enough resiliency that they won’t go away quietly and will fight to the bitter end especially with the Stanley Cup on the line.

Now we certainly had those among us who thought this would be a cake walk, but as you can see, it was a far cry from all. The more I read into your team while still playing MTL, the more concerned I got. I did not think this was going to be easy from the get go, hoped like a mofo it would though.

I agree with Morganti in that right now, in a 3 game series, Leighton is the better goalie and just like Brodeur, Rask and Halak (The hottest goaltenders in the playoffs until they played the Flyers), Niemi is looking soft and confused.

Carcillo is too high of a risk to play at this time. Did you see that lame ass charging call he got? Like him or not he is a liability and the Flyers can’t afford reputation penalties. It is a reality!

Also, I don’t think anyone here thinks JVR is great or has ever called him great. In fact, I think he might be wrongfully criticized because he was the number 2 over all pick and everyone expects him to like Patrick Kane but maybe not as good. I will admit, I have often times slammed JVR and to this day I still don’t think he will ever be anything more than a 2nd line winger, which to me, as the number 2 over all pick he should be more than that.

As for Carcillo, his biggest role is to get under the skin of the other team and with what Pronger has been doing both on and off the ice, he is being a big enough agitator for both of them. JVR brings more skill to the team than Carcillo does. I still don’t understand why JVR doesn’t park himself in front of the net and try and pick up a garbage goal but I am not the coach so whatever.

So your problem with JVR is that he doesn’t know how to play or act like a pro, plus he has way too high an opinion of himself?

JVR’s comments when he was scratched:

“When you lose, obviously you want to try to shake things up,” van Riemsdyk said. “I don’t know, the decision is up to him [Laviolette]. In the playoffs, the level goes up every game. It’s still a learning experience for me, it’s my first time here. It’s my first season still, I’m learning everything that goes on our there.”

Carcillo’s comments when he was scratched:

“It’s tough. It’s hard not to be [ticked] off, and if you’re not [ticked] off, there’s something wrong with you. Everybody wants to be playing at this time of the year. You battle the whole year to be in this position. […] A couple guys know it could have been them, and it makes them amp up their game, and I think that happened [in Game 4]. Every guy played really, really well, and we came out with a huge win, and that’s the biggest thing right now, getting wins. It’s a bit of a pride thing. It’s a tough pill to swallow. But you’ve got to come to the rink with a good attitude and work hard and just hope you get another chance.”

I fail to see how one guy is a pro and the other isn’t. And this was his comment after last night:

“Well, [Laviolette] didn’t say anything out of the ordinary,” he said. “He likes to let things marinate overnight and usually save his comments for the next day. I felt I did some good things. I think I skated pretty well, and obviously I was a little rusty on the first couple of shifts, but after that I settled in and played a much better game.”

I don’t understand the criticism.

To your first question, he made the Hawk defenseman (Keith?) look pretty silly when he beat him along the boards. He danced right around him.

a) JVR basically created that second goal.
b) He’s still learning the NHL game, and more importantly he’s still getting conditioned to the long season. Next season he will have had a full offseason to develop and be conditioned for the full season. Let’s not forget that for the early part of this year he was the only rookie at above a PPG. When he’s good, he looks VERY good. He just needs to turn those flashes into a bit more consistency.
c) What were wrong with his comments after being sat? Nothing more than the disappointment of a 21 year old getting benched in the SCF…
d) High opinion = high expectations. He said in the offseason that he wanted to make the team out of training camp. Yeah you can call that a high opinion. But guess what he did: made the team out of training camp. I think one of the problems he might have had is that his aim this year was to make the team, and he got that pretty early, and then maybe didn’t know what he was meant to be doing for the year, what role he was meant to be playing on this team.
e) No-one says he’s a great right now, but to say he hasn’t got potential to be one is wrong. His stats aren’t all that different from guys like Rick Nash and Eric Staal in their rookie years.
f) Mike Green only plays hard in the offensive zone, people still call him a great.