After seeing their win streak snapped on Monday by the Los Angeles Kings, the Flyers will look to rebound tonight against the Detroit Red Wings.
Detroit is coming off of a 6-3 win last night vs the Flyers’ Metropolitan division rival, the New York Islanders. Despite being out shot 37 to 22, the Red Wings were able to pull off the win with much better shot selection. Shockingly enough, the Red Wings sit just six points outside of a wild card spot and the third seed in the Atlantic division. I say shockingly because…well…on paper their team looks pretty bad!
We all know the Red Wings’ story by now, they gave way too much money to bottom six guys like Justin Abdelkader and Darren Helm, and their best defenseman at the moment most likely is Mike Green. Yes, that Mike Green. The guy who was an offensive juggernaut with the Washington Capitals for essentially his first three NHL seasons. Even with all of these poor decisions, they’ve still drafted relatively well and maintain within striking range in the East.
As for the Flyers, they are about to face a team on the second half of a back-to-back for the second time in the past three games. They were able to squeak out a 2-1 win vs. Dallas in the former, now let’s see what happens with the latter. Despite being on that six game win streak, the Flyers’ offense has grown cold since their 4-2 win vs. Toronto last Tuesday. With the Wings’ defense not being too much to write home about, this could be a nice jump starter for an offense that has only scored six goals in their past three games.
PHI Point Leaders
- Jakub Voracek – 41 points
- Claude Giroux – 36 points
- Sean Couturier – 30 points
DET Point Leaders
- Dylan Larkin – 27 points
- Anthony Mantha – 23 points
- Henrik Zetterberg – 23 points
What the Flyers will also hope to take advantage of in this game is the Red Wings’ poor goaltending. Jimmy Howard comes into tonight’s game with a .908 save percentage, which is miles better than Petr Mrazek’s .892 mark. With Brian Elliott most likely getting the call tonight, one would assume the Flyers have the edge in net tonight.
Team Metrics
PHI CF%: 49.15
DET CF%: 49.73
PHI xGF%: 50.40
DET xGF%: 47.67
Despite Detroit having the edge in raw CF%, most of their shot attempts seem to be coming from low percentage areas. This is reflected by their expected goals for percentage which is almost a whole three percent lower than the Flyers’ total. The Red Wings also seem to be allowing a lot of high percentage shot attempts as seen by their expected goals against, which is 13th highest in the National Hockey League. This is not the night for the Flyers to do what they did against L.A.
And the models say…
According to corsica.hockey’s few predictions up so far, the Flyers are favorites in this one by an average of 56.9 to 43.1.
Flyers Projected Lineup
Forwards
Giroux – Couturier – Simmonds
Raffl – Filppula – Voracek
Weal – Patrick – Weise
Leier – Laughton – Konecny
Defense
Provorov – MacDonald
Hagg – Gostisbehere
Sanheim – Gudas
Goalie
Elliott
(Lyon)
