Avalanche 7, Flyers 4: One step back

That\'s all she wrote, folks. Coming off of a huge win over who John Tortorella said was the best team in the league on Thursday, and playing very well of late, the Flyers stumbled a bit this afternoon. Falling behind early and being hit with some bad luck (bad luck which also extended to the injury front ), the Flyers were never able to crawl all the way back in this one. And after building up the good vibes, this was a tough one to swallow.

The basics

First period: 9:58- Logan O\'Connor (Colton, Malinski), 18:36- Mikko Rantanen (MacKinnon, Colton)

Second period: 0:43- Nathan MacKinnon (Wood, Manson), 1:49- Joel Farabee (Frost, Atkinson), 8:14- Logan O\'Connor (Wood, Colton), 12:23- Travis Konecny (Tippett, Poehling), 17:05- Nathan MacKinnon (Manson, Kiviranta)

Third period: 5:26- Tyson Foerster (Frost, Atkinson), 8:22- Cam Atkinson (Ristolainen, Cates), 12:23- Mikko Rantanen (Makar, Drouin) PPG, 19:39- Logan O\'Connor (MacKinnon, Loews) EN

SOG: 40 (PHI) - 25 (COL)

Some takeaways

By the numbers

We\'ll kick this thing off by taking a quick look into the numbers for this one, and a bit of the good news, because there is some to be found here. The Flyers, if you recall, put an absolute beating on the Dallas Stars on Thursday, running away with the territorial battle in the process of picking up perhaps their most convincing win of the season. And today, while they weren\'t able to come away with the same result, the Flyers\' process in this one wasn\'t demonstrably different.

All told, they Flyers came away from this one with 56.15 advantage in the overall shot attempts at 5-on-5 (score and venue adjusted), and a 52.21 percent advantage in Expected Goals. They were able to limit the Avalanche to just 25 shots on goal across the whole of this game,

So what happened?

It was a tough combination of factors that beat the Flyers in this one. We\'d be hard pressed to say that they didn\'t play a good game overall, but things just didn\'t break their way here. A couple of bad bounces went against them on those first two Avalanche goals, and there\'s not much you can do about that. The Flyers also were burned by a few tough turnovers -- that one might point to as being something of a byproduct of the style of play they have, they\'re just going to turn the puck over sometimes -- and this is an Avalanche team that\'s going to make you pay for those mistakes more than other opponents, that\'s just how it goes too.

But we can\'t just hand wave all of this away, though. The Flyers left some chances on the table -- they had two power plays in the first period, one while it was scoreless and one while the Avalanche were only up by one goal, and they door was wide open for them to get back into this game, but they couldn\'t close on any of their chances, and didn\'t look overly threatening on either of them. We know well the struggles of this power play, and this was a harsh reminder of how their inconsistency can bite them.

And on top of that, Carter Hart just plainly didn\'t have his best stuff today. We can\'t fault him on those first two goals, but on at least the fourth and fifth, those were stoppable chances and he just could not come up with those saves. He only faced 15 shots, and could only come away with 10 saves, that\'s a tough outing. He\'s been good on the whole this season, but he didn\'t have it today, and that made things more difficult on the skaters as well.

Vibe check

This was a tough loss to swallow, because it certainly felt that a better result was deserved here, and was within reach for much of it. But we do have to give the team credit for being able to hang with the Avalanche through the whole of the game, for not packing it in and shifting their sights to tomorrow\'s game early. Not too long ago, they would have done just that and this thing would have gotten really ugly on them. So there\'s some real evidence of growth here.

The big question, now, will be how they respond tomorrow against the Senators, coming off a tough loss where they likely expended a lot of energy in order to stay in it. They had a difficult test today, and tomorrow isn\'t going to be any easier (in its own way).

All stats via Natural Stat Trick and NHL.com

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