With a huge win collected in Saturday’s Game 1 in Pittsburgh — and an even bigger first blow dealt in this already spirited series — the Flyers have a chance to put the Penguins completely on the ropes before the series shifts back home to Philadelphia, if they can keep the ball rolling and replicate some of the good work they put in throughout that first matchup.
That task, though, will be easier said than done.
For this experienced Penguins team, this would have been a difficult loss for them to swallow, a start to the series — even if the immediate high emotions made for appointment viewing — which was assuredly less focused and less disciplined than they would have envisioned in their game plan. In turn, the Flyers will need to be ready to face what’s sure to be an extra motivated group coming into tonight’s game, and work on raising their own level of play to meet that.
There’s more that they can get out of their own offense at even strength, to be sure, but perhaps even more critical is their need to find a way to get their power play going.
The saga of the Flyers’ power play has been a dramatic one, as they’ve toiled for much of the season and not found a lot to show for it — after starting the season on a bit of a hot streak, the production slowed down to a crawl, and began a steady drop down to the bottom of the league standings, on their way to finishing the season with a paltry 15.7 percent conversion rate. It’s an issue that the team has been acutely aware of, and they’ve spent much of this last month tinkering with their units and looking for some shorter-term solutions that they could implement down the stretch, and this has paid some dividends. That is, in four of the Flyers final games of the season in which they iced their regular units, they were able to convert for a goal on the man-advantage, and put a bit of wind back in their sails.
And while that did help them build back up some momentum, the continuance of it would be short-lived.
Indeed, that momentum came to a screeching halt on Saturday in Pittsburgh, as the Flyers struggled in a big way to create much of anything through their three attempts on the power play — they played the full duration of the six minutes, and were only able to two shots on goal (both from Christian Dvorak), and only three scoring chances, and on the whole looked a bit unsettled and disorganized, spending too much time shuffling pucks around looking for the right play, rather than attacking while the opportunities were in front of them. It felt, in all, a marked step back in the process and a deflation in their in-game momentum on the other side of each attempt. Once again, the power play looked more like a drain on them than a boost, and with that, something needs to give before too long.
The Flyers have done some quite strong shot suppression work throughout the first matchup, but the team on the other side is going to be throwing everything they can at responding to that, and eventually this Penguins offense is going to wake up. It will be important for the Flyers to remain steady in their defending in the face of that, to be sure, but giving themselves some more run support would go a long way, as the games tighten up and the margin for error narrows.
If they want to keep building their game in the right direction as the rest of this series plays out, the power play is going to need to be a major well in need of tapping into. We’ve seen them make progress in this area — looking cleaner in their ability to move through the neutral zone, passing more decisively, and focusing their efforts more on funneling pucks to the net for more dangerous chances. The recipe for success is in their hands, and it’s a good thing that it is, because the lack of practice time at their disposal means that there isn’t much opportunity here to fine tune any adjustments that the coaching staff wants to put in place, short of doing it wholly on the fly.
The equation is changing, but the hope is that, with a bit of experience now banked and any potential first game jitters in the rear view, the Flyers can get back to their own most focused game, and continue to make noise through the first leg of this series.
All stats via Natural Stat Trick and the NHL.
