The Game: 7:00 PM, NBCSP, ESPN+, 97.5 The Fanatic
We’re back at it for the second half of another back-to-back folks, and this one is a big one. The Flyers are riding high after a huge win over the Panthers last night, and this allowed them to pull themselves out of the basement of the Metro, and vault themselves over the Islanders and the Rangers and back into that sixth place position. The standings in their division are super tight right now, and another win tonight would allow the Flyers to jump the Penguins and move within a point of the Blue Jackets and the final playoff spot. It’s still very early, but the stakes are high already.
On the other side, these Blue Jackets are looking very different from the Blue Jackets we saw last back in December, when they were the ones dwelling in the bottom of the standings and the Flyers dealt them losses in both of their two meetings. Things have been clicking well for them, allowing them to string together some wins — four in a row and seven in their last 10 games — and gain some ground in the standings in the process. Things have been rolling for them very well, there’s no denying it, and they’re going to make for another difficult opponent for the Flyers.
Storylines to Watch
Can the power play keep rolling?
It feels a little strange to say it, a little foreign, but the Flyers’ power play is on a bit of a tear. After going three games without picking up a goal, they now have two in each of their last two games. Now the streakiness that they’ve had to contend with for the whole of the season up to this point would have us feeling like they’re inevitably bound to go cold eventually, probably soon. But things do seem to be clicking well at the moment, and they’re going to need all of the scoring help they can get tonight, so the hope is that they can at least keep this thing rolling a little while longer.
Backup Watch
With Sam Ersson now well and truly back into the swing of things and back established as the starter, the big question of the backup, the race for that role, seems to have reset itself. As the backup last night, it seems likely that Ivan Fedotov will get the nod for the start in this one, and the next opportunity to pull ahead in the race for the backup role. Both he and Aleksei Kolosov have shown some inconsistency of late, but Fedotov’s had the runway recently to make his case. It hasn’t been a slam dunk for him, but he’s been chipping away at it.
The rest advantage
The Flyers and Blue Jackets aren’t too different in their configurations or their places in their rebuild arcs, so there isn’t much of a mismatch in that department, but where a mismatch will come into play here is in the area of rest. That is, the Flyers are coming off of a pretty high-intensity win last night, after which they packed up their bags and headed to Columbus for this quick turnaround. The Blue Jackets, in contrast, haven’t played a game since Saturday, so they’re coming into this one fresh, with loads of rest and time to tinker in practice in their back pocket. It’ll be tough for the Flyers to keep up their intensity in this one as the game goes on, but we’ll see how well they fare in this next test of their conditioning.
The Lineups
Philadelphia Flyers
Tyson Foerster – Noah Cates – Bobby Brink
Owen Tippett – Morgan Frost – Travis Konecny
Olle Lycksell – Sean Couturier – Matvei Michkov
Scott Laughton – Ryan Poehling – Garnet Hathaway
Cam York – Travis Sanheim
Egor Zamula – Rasmus Ristolainen
Nick Seeler – Jamie Drysdale
Ivan Fedotov
(Aleksei Kolosov)
Columbus Blue Jackets
Dmitri Voronkov – Adam Fantilli – Kirill Marchenko
James van Riemsdyk – Cole Sillinger – Kent Johnson
Zach Aston-Reece – Luca Del Bel Belluz – Mathieu Olivier
Mikael Pyyhtia – Sean Kuraly – Kevin Labanc
Zach Werenski – Dante Fabbro
Denton Mateychuk – Ivan Provorov
Jake Christianson – Damon Severson
Elvis Merzlikens
(Daniil Tarasov)