Monday Morning Fly By: Take a Short Break

…this team has at least earned a standing O from those in attendance. Moot point, however, since they’ll be taking this series back to Chicago for one last game

At what point do these apocryphal Hockey Gods step in?

My last threads of spirituality will be sheared if there isn’t a karmic enema lasting from Wednesday night through into the weekend.

I had a bad feeling about this game, right from the start, when NBC put on an embarrassing recreation of the game 4 Giroux goal, illustrating more than anything that Mike Millbury’s mediocre skills as a player have degenerated in recent years to those of a C level peewee hockey player.

It’s bad enough that we have to listen to Millbury who has a long established history of hating the Flyers, do commentary, but now we have to watch enjoyable plays that speak for themselves, be over analyzed to the point of parody and ridicule.

Between Pierre McGuire, Ed Olczyk and Emerick, I doubt seriously NBC could have assembled a group to provide play by play that harbours more anti-Flyer bias, and while they no doubt do try their pathetic best to suppress it, they just can’t seem to contain their glee at things going Chicago’s way. Case in point, while they replayed Hartnell’s hit that sent a Chicago D-Man flying, about all that was said was “Ohhhhh” while Byfuglien gets one huge hit on Pronger, and we have to endure countless reviews and analysis of how this single play that otherwise resulted in nothing important happening, somehow is the focal point of the series.

How many times in this series have we had to listen to the commentators bemoan penalties, they think the Flyers “got away with” while sitting silently on Hawks non-calls most egregiously the 10 stitch Duncan Keith wack to the face on Briere. “Briere’s bleeding badly…” as if he had magically inflicted this on himself. Where was the outrage, and call for the required 4 minute penalty?

FUK NBC’S COMMENTATORS. You suck as sports journalists!

(There I said it… Rant mode off)

Certainly that was a disappointing effort, but let’s give credit to the Hawks:

-They came out and played with grit, determination and an out and out physical assault. It was plain and simple, one of the most awesome 11 minute stretches of team hockey any team has mustered in the playoffs. The Flyers were literally in shock, and they did not adapt well, or do things to counteract the pressure. Plays have to be made, and up and down the ice, the Flyers did not make plays, the Hawks did, and that is why the game was 3-0.

-Now onto some of the things I think the Flyers did wrong, especially in decisions coming from behind the bench that I think contributed substantially to making the Flyers look like a clown car with its wheels coming off.

I wish Lavvy would drop from his repertoire — the mix line that he used to start the game with Giroux on wing instead of Carter.

PLEASE STOP DOING THIS!!!!

When Giroux is on his game, he can turn things to our favour, but the complete debacle of the first shift set the tone, and completely derailed Giroux who played one of his worst games in the series, and probably took the wind out of Carter’s sails as well. A huge part of what makes us dangerous is that our 3rd line can take the momentum and establish our offensive game. This obviously did not happen.

Worse yet, it allowed Quenville’s change to shift his shutdown D off the first line and onto Briere seem like a work of genius, rather than a risky gamble that we could use to make them pay. You’re trying to get Jeff Carter going in the series — what help is it to sit your leading scorer, and one of our best defensive forwards on the first shift of the game, especially after he potted the empty netter the game before? I was just baffled by this.

-Leighton was in no way to blame for our being down 3-0. I don’t care how many of you Leighton haters come out of the woodwork to berate the guy and claim that we’d somehow have been up 2-0 if only Leighton hadn’t let in a goal, but I have news for you based on what was going on, the majority of the goalies in the NHL would have let in 2 or 3 or even more goals. Chicago came out the hungrier team, were all over the Flyers both physically and via bold challenges from their D men in support of the O, and the Flyers simply buckled under the pressure.

I deleted the game after it was over and have no plan to revisit that nightmare, but I seem to recall the shots being something like 11-0 early on, with a huge percentage of those shots being good scoring chances, and it wasn’t even that close. In fact Leighton made some good saves in that early barrage. The Flyers dumped the puck into the opposing team’s zone maybe twice. The Hawks could have pulled Niemi for an extra attacker, it was actually that bad. The D and wings were so tight, they repeatedly lost the puck, dumped it into board pressure and turned it over at our own blue line. I mean it was bad - right?

-Perfunctory griping about the refs:
To make matters worse, we were subject to the infliction of some of the worse reffing of the series, so the momentum was about as one sided as it gets. Chicago deserves total props for their effort and play in the first, without a doubt, so I don’t want this to be confused, but I was really really pissed off that we would see that type of shit reffing in such a pivotal game, and the bottom line is that the Hawks in no way needed help, but they got some anyways.

Chicago came out to make a physical statement, and they got away with murder all over the ice, from a letter of the law standpoint, which is fine by me, if you let the teams play. But last night it looked like the refs were equipped with special goggles that only see white and orange away jerseys. The back breaking penalty on Pronger was an absolute joke, and seemed to be once again a call spurred on by the Chicago crowd, who scream for a penalty every time 2 players come together anywhere on the ice. I also can’t help but wonder what we might have done with 4 minutes of PP time, with Duncan Keith sitting in the box as Danny Briere got his 10 stitches to close a wound which happened right off the frigging face off. I continue not to understand how they miss calls like this on both sides of the ice.

-Lavvy continues to drive me absolutely batshit bonkers with his goalie games. So we survived the assault and it was nearly as bad as it gets: 3-0 down, but you could see towards the end of the first that the Flyers had started to calm down, and the team was starting to work their way back to the game. Yes it’s 3 goals down, but then there was that matter of game 7 in Boston.

I was absolutely stunned to see Boosh in the net at the start of period 2! Instead of giving Leighton a chance to build his confidence back, and allow the team to play their way back in the game (which in fact is exactly what happened) we once again see goalie roulette, featuring a guy who was knocked out of the series with 2 sprained knees reinserted. To what end???? Boosh ultimately would go on to make some really nice saves while also giving up 3 goals.

I just don’t understand the benefits of this, and in hindsight what is far worse is that we actually had a chance in this game and it ended up being squandered, because after we potted a couple, you could see the pressure shifting right back onto the Hawks. Sometimes when the worse thing you can imagine happens, you loosen up. The team played like shit around the guy, and the Hawks were buzzing around the net, screening and doing everything they vowed they wanted to do. That is not a goalie problem it’s a goddamn team defense and lack of offense problem. Putting in a goalie who is quite simply, just not physically ready to stand on his head isn’t fair to Boosh, or the other players. The goalie pull should be reserved for times when your goalie has absolutely sucked, and cost you a game that you could by all rights be up in, not a single period where your entire team got shellacked all across the ice. BAD MOVE. DOESN’T WORK.

-Will someone please write a coaching manual that explains that pulling your goalie while 2 goals down with over 2 minutes to go, is a move that more than likely insures that the other team gets to spend those last 2 minutes celebrating their 3 goal win while their fans enjoy the equivalent of a humiliating 3 goal blowout, instead of giving your team to maybe pot one more and make it really really tight? Maybe we could send said manual to Lavvy over the summer?

To summarize, this was one of Lavvy’s worse coached games of the playoffs if not the year. That exacerbated a confused effort from a team that were essentially beaten in one one period of a 3 period game.

-Light at the end of the tunnel:

Despite getting rolled at various times, the team continued to counterpunch and show that they have the ability to undress the hawks D on a regular basis. If Richards or Leino were able to pot one of those 2 empty net shots, what might have happened?

The Hawks have played from a lead all year long, and they sure are comfortable there. We can not afford to let them play from ahead, and so far at home we haven’t. This makes for a clear goal for the Flyers: you can’t sit back and wait to see what the Hawks are going to do.

It goes without saying that the team needs to rebound from a reallly bad effort where we were outplayed, outmatched and outcoached.

The same could be said for the what the Hawks experienced in game 4.

And we responded from our worst effort in the Montreal series with a complete 180, just as the Hawks did in game 5.

This is a glorious once in a lifetime opportunity. Now it’s up to the players.