Last night’s game, there’s no other way around it, was a rough one. The Flyers were riding high, coming home after defeating one of the best teams in the league on their own home ice in Winnipeg on Saturday, and looking to keep the ball rolling and make an impression as the Calgary Flames came to town.
But with that goal in mind, it very quickly became apparent that something was just off with the Flyers on a pretty collective level. It began with Sam Ersson looking lost in net, giving up three goals on the first five shots he faced, and getting yanked before we even hit the midway point of the first period, but as off as he might have been, it pretty quickly became clear that he was far from the only player who wasn’t at top form in this matchup.
Because the Flyers struggled on a collective level with their fundamentals across just about the whole of the game — they were losing their battles, turning pucks over, failing to complete on routine looking passes, and struggling to get up-ice in transition as a result. It was messy, and players were, as John Tortorella commented post-game, making mistakes “that we just don’t make.”
This was a game that left everyone looking around for answers, but it was one where none might be found. Tortorella (and players alike) wondered about the fatigue level, “the second day after those guys get to bed [at] three thirty, four o’clock coming back from Winnipeg,” how “lethargic and sloppy” the whole group looked, and if the weight of the long trip was catching up to them. Noah Cates lamented the way that the team can sometimes come back home and play differently, and Travis Konecny wondered if that’s them overcomplicating it, trying to put on a show for the fans, but Tortorella sort of didn’t buy that.
“I think players always have to say something to you guys and answer your questions,” he told the assembled media last night, suggesting that those were perhaps too easy or tidy narratives to assign to this game. Their play isn’t excusable, and if it spills over beyond last night’s game that’s a problem, but as far as why this went so badly sideways here, it’s not worth deeply reading into.
As he sees it, this “happens all through the league. Teams have bad games. Again, I’m not going to magnify and dissect it. I do think when you see a group as lethargic and just not sharp, I’m going to lean on it just comes off of that travel. Whether it’s right or wrong, I’ll go with that. Then I’ll flush it down the toilet and just get ready to play our next game. I’m not gonna dissect it and answer a bunch of questions about why this or that. It’s done with. We played pretty well here since after the break, we’re just gonna try to get back at it.”
It’s a long season and teams are going to have poor showings smattered throughout, some explicable, some not. At this point, the team’s job is not to analyze it to death, but take what they can from it and put in focused work not to let these bad habits breach containment from this bad game. They’re staring down a very good Jets team coming to town tomorrow, who are going to want to get some revenge on them, and the task at hand is to be ready to regroup and be ready to go when they arrive. Simple as that.
