Blue Jackets 6, Flyers 2: Somehow it got worse

What can we say here? The Flyers, after a tough loss to the Sabres yesterday came into Columbus for an absolute must win game, and instead put together a pretty brutal showing, for what might well have been their worst loss of the season. Let\'s unpack it.

The Basics

First period: 12:08- Erik Gudbranson (Pyyhtia, Danforth), 18:54- Damon Severson (Werenski, Gaudreau)

Second period: 8:23- Damon Severson (Gaudreau, Nylander), 14:32- Olle Lycksell (Hathaway), 15:20- Nick Blankenburg (Jiricek, Texier)

Third period: 9:29- Zack Werenski (Voronkov), 11:26- Zack Werenski (Meyer, Malatesta), 15:08- Adam Ginning (Cates, Attard)

SOG: 39 (PHI) - 34 (CBJ)

Some Takeaways

Chances squandered

We\'ve seen how this game ultimately played out, how badly things went sideways on the Flyers, but the game actually began looking like it might have some promise for them. With a Blue Jackets penalty taken inside the first two minutes of the game -- a high sticking double minor -- the Flyers were gifted four minutes of power play time with which they could (hopefully) jump out to an early lead and begin to take this thing over.

Instead, they came away empty handed. They weren\'t entirely without their chances, as they put up four high danger chances, but they couldn\'t close on any of them, and on the whole just didn\'t look overly threatening, despite the extended offensive zone time that they managed. There was overpassing, there were chances missing the net, and a spillover of the lack of sharpness we\'ve seen from them at even strength hurt them again (but more on that later).

One nice thing

There\'s not a lot that feels good to talk about from this game, but we\'d be remiss if we didn\'t at least mention our one small positive to come out of this game. The Flyers did not have much going for them in the scoring department, but they did get one from Olle Lycksell, who finally, finally, notched his first NHL goal.

https://twitter.com/NHLFlyers/status/1776771224539935173

And this was a welcome sight, to be sure, as it certainly felt like it was a long time coming. Lycksell hasn\'t been a constant presence in the lineup, but when he has been in, he\'s been quite a consistent generator of good scoring chances. It\'s a shame that this milestone comes in the midst of such a brutal loss, will get lost in it, but it was well deserved all the same.

Keeping with the theme...

Okay, we lied, it\'s more than one bit of good news (but still not a lot of it). Lycksell wasn\'t the only one to pick up his first NHL goal tonight -- we also saw Adam Ginning get in on the action as well.

https://twitter.com/NHLFlyers/status/1776784234650189921

It was a bit of a strange goal in context, as it came at effectively garbage time, and the Flyers as a whole saw absolutely no energy boost as a result of it, but still, good for Ginning all the same.

A note on chances

On a raw number of chances level, this one ends up grading out relatively evenly -- as we saw, the Flyers took the shots on goal margin 39-34 across all situations, and came out even in shot attempts (65-65) at 5-on-5 -- but this, we know, wasn\'t the complete picture.

The Flyers clearly weren\'t struggling for chances period through the whole of the game, but something that did hurt them was their lack of really quality chances. The Flyers put 65 shots in the direction of the net at 5-on-5, but only 35 of them hit the net, and just 12 of them were classified as high danger chances. The Flyers were overwhelmingly limited to creating offense from the perimeter, and while they did get one goal from a shot from the point (thank you, Adam Ginning), we know well that this is not a sustainable recipe for success.

Looking cooked

But it wasn\'t just the lack of quality chances that killed the Flyers in this one. It wasn\'t just their inability to score on the power play. It was a drop in energy. It was a sloppiness with the puck. It was a bit of puck luck going against them, as well. But all in all, this amounted to the Flyers just looking... finished.

It\'s a difficult moment to be confronted with -- a team that had found so much success early in the season is now stumbling at the worst time. And call it running out of gas, call it some kind of regression, call it an inexperienced team not knowing how to respond when things are going badly when it\'s the most important time for them to be going well. Call it whatever you want, but the Flyers looked pretty dead in the water tonight. It isn\'t over for them yet, mathematically they are very much still in this fight. But they\'re running out of time to pull it together, and their lack of resilience tonight doesn\'t imbue us with a lot of faith that they\'ll be turning it around quickly.

All stats via Natural Stat Trick.

Talking Points