The game: 6:00 PM, ESPN, 97.5 The Fanatic
Welcome back, folks! The Flyers, after dropping their home opener against the Canucks on Saturday in both bad and boring fashion, are right back at it again tonight, kicking off their back-to-back, home-and-home series with the Capitals. The Flyers will be looking to get back on track with this one, as they’re coming off of a five-game stretch to start the season in which they’ve only picked up one win. The play overall hasn’t been terrible, but between breakdowns in the defense and goaltending and an underlying process still being polished up, they’ve gotten burned enough times to keep the results from going their way. It’s still early, though, so we’re not panicking, but it would be nice to see things start to turn around sooner rather than later.
The Capitals, on the flip side, have found a nice bit of success to start the season. With a slightly retooled lineup coming together over the offseason, the Capitals have added some more scoring punch, and it’s served them well — they’ve won three of the four games they’ve played so far, and that’ll make this one an interesting matchup, to say the least.
Players to watch
Nick Seeler
We saw some shuffling of the lines in yesterday’s practice, and while up front it was a bit of mixing and matching for a different look, on the back end, it was a shuffling out of Erik Johnson to make room for Nick Seeler, who’s back and healthy at last.
Now, while it feels like a hard sell to suggest that Seeler’s return to the lineup will be the magic switch flip that will fix the struggling defense, but at the very least, his presence does allow all of the pieces to fall together a little more nicely. It could well take him a little bit of time to get back up to speed, so we’re not expecting miracles here, but it will be nice to see him getting going again, and the hope is that he can at least bring a bit more stability than we’ve seen from the back end so far. Baby steps, right?
Nic Deslauriers
Speaking of both the forward shuffling and season debuts, it appears that Nic Deslauriers will be finding himself in the lineup for the first time this season, with Jett Luchanko coming out of it. And the reasoning behind this is something of a question mark — maybe Luchanko needs a night to sit and watch, they’re just doing a regular rotation thing, or perhaps this is a matchup that the coaching staff anticipates as being more physical, and they want to have Deslauriers in the lineup to counter that. Whatever the reasoning, this will give the fourth line a very different feel — heavier checking and more physical, rather than fast — and we’ll see how the results bear out.
Sam Ersson
The Flyers, as we said, will really be looking to get themselves back on track beginning with this game, and a key part to that effort will be Ersson’s play. Now, don’t mistake us here, Errson’s play in his first three starts has been solid, and he was one of the standouts in Saturday’s otherwise uninspiring outing. He’s not a player that we necessarily need to see more from in order to help right the ship here, but rather, the hope is that he’s able to maintain his form while getting the bulk of the starts. He’s already shown that he can lay a solid foundation for the skaters to build on with his play, and he just needs to keep that up, if the team wants to be able to continue to build up and onward.
The lineups
Flyers
Foerster-Frost-Konecny
Tippett-Poehling-Michkov
Farabee-Couturier-Brink
Deslauriers-Laughton*-Hathaway
*Cates skated on this line during yesterday’s practice, Laughton’s availability it still unconfirmed, as he was away yesterday while his wife was in labor. We’ll see how this looks in warmups.
York-Sanheim
Seeler-Drysdale
Zamula-Ristolainen
Ersson
(Fedotov)
Capitals
Protas-Strome-Ovechkin
McMichael-Dubois-Wilson
Vrana-Lapierre-Mangiapane
Duhaime-Dowd-Raddysh
Chychrun-Carlson
Fehervary-McIlrath
Sandin-TvR
Lindgren
(Thompson)