The Flyers are on the downswing again.
So much of this first half and change of the season has been made up of pretty dramatic peaks and valleys, a whiplashing that the team is still working at figuring out how to tamp down.
The Flyers entered last night’s game on a high — just about as much of a high as possible, after delivering handily the league’s best team their sixth regulation loss of the season (and just their second on home ice) — and they had a chance to prove that they are capable of carrying positive momentum game over game, but they fell well short of that aim, in the end.
Instead, what they delivered was one of their flatter showings of the season. Despite the Islanders not being quite the same caliber of opponent as the most-recently beaten Golden Knights and Avalanche, this matchup wasn’t going to be an easy one, with it being a scrap between divisional opponents, and a meeting with a goaltender who has largely had their number over the past few seasons, and while this challenge should have made for an easy game to get up for, a matchup they knew they would have to get their offensive execution going in, they just had next to nothing going for them. They didn’t have many dangerous chances to speak of in this one — just 13 shots on goal at 5-on-5 and a meager five high danger chances — and their attention to detail both with and without the puck was inconsistent at best, while their pace of play was markedly below where it needed to be.
They were, altogether, an easy group to shut down on the way to a 4-0 shutout by the Islanders.
“We had no energy,” head coach Rick Tocchet told media after the game. “It’s kind of disappointing, it’s a division game, after you know coming off the road, that’s a tough effort. That’s on me. I think we’re 3-11-4 or something after a win, so that’s on the coach, that’s on me. I’ll wear it. So I gotta get these guys ready to play after a win. I don’t know what guys were doing with the last two days, but I don’t even know if anybody played well. I think the Islanders did enough to win, they didn’t really do much either, they just clogged the neutral zone. We just decided to keep putting pucks to the middle instead of having speed, we didn’t have much speed tonight so, that’s on me.”
Part of what made the Flyers’ road trip so successful was the resilience that they were able to show — bouncing back from tough losses to the Rangers and Mammoth on the way to massive wins over two of the best teams in the West in the Golden Knights and Avalanche — but what’s also been reinforced clearly is that for as much resilience as this team has been able to deliver throughout the season, there’s a level of immaturity in their collective game simmering beneath all of that.
“You gotta handle prosperity.” Tocchet went on, “You win a game where you feel good about yourself, but you gotta be even keel. And to be a really good team, or a good team, you have to handle prosperity. You know, you gotta… let the game go, even though it’s a good game for you, let it go, and get your business hat on for the next game. And obviously we didn’t.
“For whatever reason,” he concluded, “all of us were just not in the game. The game plan wasn’t… the game plan was there, we didn’t execute it, and that’s on me.”
It’s a commendable angle to take, in a way, but the subtext of the point remains quite clear. The staff didn’t coach a perfect game either — particularly, the decision to open the second power play of the night with the top unit, who did not perform well on their first attempt, and who would ultimately allow the Islanders’ shorthanded goal in part due to a lack of urgency which Tocchet was so critical of postgame, was a confounding bit of game management — but they did largely give the players the tools that they needed to succeed. Perhaps there’s more that they can do to get the players ready, but they can’t do it all, and there comes a point, always, when the players just have to dig deep and find a way to execute. It’s part of being a good team, and it’s part of being good pros, and it’s a lesson which remains ongoing for this group, it would seem.
All stats via Natural Stat Trick.
