In the heat of a tightly contested playoff series, it’s difficult to argue for moral victories, but it remains that even as the Flyers conceded another win to the Penguins last night to bring the series to a more narrow 3-2 margin, there were still positives in their play and reasons left for optimism that they can still get this thing back on track.
Saturday’s Game 4 showing on home ice was, more comfortably, a poor showing. The Flyers lacked pace through much of the first half of the game, and even when they were able to get their legs going, they just looked disconnected — overpassing on chances that could have been made more directly, struggling to connect on passes cleanly in succession beyond that, and making more hope plays than anything else. It was a sloppy effort, in sum, indeed their ugliest of the series so far, but it left them with a clear checklist of areas that needed to improve if they wanted to improve their game and keep themselves in this series. And while last night’s showing saw them continue to struggle in executing, there was progress made in bringing their process back up to a level more conducive to success.
Pace bounces back
One of the more troubling bits of Saturday’s performance was how thoroughly bogged down the Flyers looked through much of the game. Pace has been the foundation for just about everything else that they’ve been able to generate throughout this series, and to see it pretty wholly lacking through long stretches of that game meant that the Flyers were doing a lot themselves to neutralize their own offense and make the Penguins’ lives easier in defending them. For a game in which they were supposed to be looking to implement some lessons and put away this series away cleanly, the sense of urgency just was not there to the degree that it needed to be. Whether it was fatigue or complacency, the Flyers just did not seem to have gotten up for this game to the degree that they needed to, and it put them on their heels right from the jump.
It was, though, a pretty complete turnaround that they were able to deliver in Pittsburgh, as they made it clear that they learned their lesson from coming out too flat. Even without the benefit of the extra day off, the Flyers came out with energy, with a willingness to engage physically, and were clearly looking to set a different tone early in that one, and carry it better throughout the whole of the game, and they accomplished that well.
Now, sometimes that pace went a little too far and led to mistakes and dangerous chances created against them (and, indeed, the first Penguins goal of the night), but the spirit was there, the energy was there, and it’s a lot easier to take a breath and settle things down than it is to manufacture energy on the fly. Game 5, if nothing else, was informative in how to walk the line between playing quick and engaged and playing too loose entirely, adding their next lesson for implementation.
Improving wall play
As they were looking to improve the bigger picture of their play through their overall pace, so too were they working on fine tuning some of the finer points of their game. The Flyers were getting killed along the walls in Game 4, there’s no other way around it. And it was a tough snowballing effect — the team was getting so stifled in the middle of the ice by the Penguins’ forecheck that they shifted their approach to attempting to throw everything around the boards to give them another option when the clean tape-to-tape passes weren’t working for them, but the Penguins, it seemed, were coming up with every loose puck along the walls and regaining possession easily, and even as the Flyers were able to improve some areas of their game as that matchup went on, that play was just not one that they seemed to be able to adjust away from in-game.
But with the benefit of a day off and some time to look back at the tape, the Flyers will have identified this as a problem and made a concerted effort to steer away from getting themselves into trouble with an over-reliance on this play, and the good news is that this was a big reason for their improved look in Game 5. The team looked more confident stepping up to make an actual play, looked much cleaner in their passing, and saw themselves able to generate more sustained offensive zone time as a result. It wasn’t a complete fix, but it was a sound foundation set to build up from tonight.
Getting to the right areas
All of that amounted, then, to an increase in quality chances in their last time out. With that increase in good offensive zone time, and some of the panic taken out of their game, the Flyers were able to get their offense going a little better. Their ability to move the puck around better was a real boost, but so too was their greater consistency in getting to the hard areas, to the interior, to create better looks. And for that work, too, they were rewarded, as they were able to put up 23 scoring chances at 5-on-5, up from just 16 in Game 4.
Of course, while the Flyers were able to bear down and create a much higher volume of scoring chances in Game 5, they lost some of the netfront presence that they were able to still deliver in Game 4 (even if they were missing on the vast majority of those chances in the Saturday game, still), dropping back to five high danger chances from six at 5-on-5, and that remains a major area open for exploiting. After all, in both of his starts, Arturs Silovs has been leaving some big rebounds right in front, ripe for capitalizing on, but the Flyers just haven’t been able to get to those areas to really make him pay for that. All the same, if we’re seeing this, surely it’s come up in their pre-scout as well, and that remains as the logical next thing for them to look to improve on.
Because, all in all, this certainly remains a work in progress — if it wasn’t the Flyers would have been able to storm all the way back to come away with the win and close out the series completely last night — but it’s encouraging to see the incremental improvement unfolding for them. After all, the step forward they took last night was enough to get them within reach of a win, and if they’re able to keep chipping away at it, they’ll get that much closer, still. The Penguins, on their own side, have had to expend a lot to get themselves back into this series, and it’s hard to imagine an again core such as this one having an infinite well of energy to tap into through the rest of this series. The Flyers are still well in control of their own destiny, and as they learn these hard lessons in just how much it takes to put away a playoff series, they put themselves in a better position to execute next time around.
All stats via Natural Stat Trick.
