The Game: 7:30 PM ET, Hulu, ESPN+, 97.5 The Fanatic
Another day, another hockey game. After last night’s outing in Detroit, the Flyers are right back at it again tonight at home, facing off against the Los Angeles Kings. They’ll be wanting to get themselves into rebound mode, and in short order, as they’re coming off of an undeniably tough loss to the Red Wings last night. They kept it close, we’ll give them that, losing by a 6-4 score, but it was altogether a pretty untidy effort, and one which left a good deal of frustration in its wake. Somehow, this sums up the whole vibe of the night pretty well.
ok so
— Broad Street Hockey (@BroadStHockey) December 19, 2024
• ref raises his arm
• Torts pulls Ersson on what he thought was a delayed penalty
• it was 6-on-5
• officials go "what the hell?" and call a Too Many Men penalty on the Flyers
• Torts goes "what the HELL?" and starts screaming about the initial call
• no penalties.
The Flyers are looking to get themselves back on track in this one, but the Kings aren’t going to make it easy on them. They have the rest advantage, for starters, as they haven’t played since Tuesday. They’re also, plain and simple, a good team on the other side of the ice there. As it stands, the Kings are sitting in the second position in the Pacific, and have wins in seven of their last 10 games, and points in eight of them. Even with their last game coming in as a loss — in overtime to the Penguins — the Kings are riding a reasonably hot streak, and will look to continue that tonight.
This looks to be an interesting stylistic matchup as well, with the Kings so far having founds some real success in their defensive play — they’re +15 in their goal differential on the season, a perfect mirror of the Flyers’ -15, and while they’re scoring a little bit less than the Flyers are on average, they’re also giving up a lot less, about 2.5 goals per game. We saw the Flyers finding ways to get some scoring going last night, even if they weren’t playing their most complete game, but to get going against this Kings team is going to be another challenge entirely, and they’re going to need to be ready to go right from the jump.
Storylines To Watch
Vibe check
And this brings us to probably our biggest question heading into this game — just which Flyers team is going to show up tonight? So far this season, we’ve seem them bring really complete and dynamic performances, creating a good volume of dangerous scoring chances, and playing with an unrelenting pace and pressure. But we’ve also seen them look the way they did last night — a bit listless, attention to their details wavering, struggling to even get shots on net, getting skated circles around.
The Flyers saved themselves from total embarrassment thanks to their offense finding a way to break through on a few good looks, but the mistakes they were making were still pretty brutal, and they were ones they simply cannot repeat. The need to find a way to reset, and to do it quickly.
Will Michkov get one?
It’s been an uncharacteristically quiet stretch for Matvei Michkov, of late. No, really — he’s been pretty consistent in getting himself on the board in some capacity, and has only gone three consecutive games at most without a point this season, but that’s a mark that he hit for the second time last night in Detroit. Another pointless night for him tonight, then, would mark his longest points drought, to date.
History — albeit his short history in this league — would have us believe that Michkov is due for one tonight, and the fact that he’s still gotten some good looks even throughout this drought would make that even easier to believe. But it’s still been a bit of a difficult stretch, and one of the challenges laid before him here is that of not allowing things to snowball when things aren’t breaking exactly his way. To see him break the streak would be great, but in the absence of that, seeing him not allowing frustration to creep in would be the next best thing.
The goaltenders rotate on
With Sam Ersson’s last turn up last night coming and going — a turn which saw him hung out to dry a number of times, and doing the best he could in the face of that, but also showing some moments of unsteadiness in play — the wheel will spin again and another name will be called tonight.
Aleksei Kolosov, who backed up last night in Detroit, seems the safe bet to get the start tonight (though this won’t be confirmed until later this evening). It will be Kolosov’s first start in a week — the last we saw him, he was flying under the radar a bit, backstopping well against a low-shooting effort, while Scott Laughton was busy putting up four goals on the Red Wings. That was a good showing, to be sure, but he’s still working on finding a bit more consistency in his level of play at the NHL level — understandable given his age and lack of experience, but a work in progress, all the same. Tonight will be the next step up in that aim, should he indeed get the nod to face a team that, while they’ve been pretty middling this season in the number of goals they’re scoring, relative to the rest of the league, still has some legitimate firepower at their disposal.
The Lineups
Philadelphia Flyers
Joel Farabee – Sean Couturier – Travis Konecny
Owen Tippett – Morgan Frost – Matvei Michkov
Tyson Foerster – Noah Cates – Bobby Brink
Scott Laughton – Ryan Poehling – Garnet Hathaway
Cam York – Travis Sanheim
Egor Zamula – Rasmus Ristolainen
Nick Seeler – Jamie Drysdale
Aleksei Kolosov
(Sam Ersson)
Los Angeles Kings
Alex Turcotte – Anze Kopitar – Adrian Kempe
Kevin Fiala – Phillip Danault – Alex Laferriere
Warren Foegele – Quinton Byfield – Tanner Jeannot
Kyle Burroughs – Samuel Helenius – Akil Thomas
Mikey Anderson – Vladislav Gavrikov
Joel Edmundson – Brandt Clarke
Jacob Moverare – Jordan Spence
Darcy Kuemper
(David Rittich)
