The Flyers, riding high after snapping their losing streak with a big win over the Capitals on
Tuesday, went into their final game before the break with a significant challenge on their hands — keeping their positive momentum rolling now that they finally had it. And while there were pieces in the matchup which worked in their favor, between a similarly matchup Senators team broadly, but more precisely one starting a 37-year old James Reimer only a handful of games into his stint with Ottawa after a recall from the AHL, the Flyers ultimately failed to capitalize on runway that they had in front of them.
What went wrong
The issues facing the Flyers in this game were numerous, but most foundational to their struggles was their inability to get much of anything going as far as their offense was concerned. It was a meager two shots on goal that the Flyers were able to generate through the first period of play, and this would be an apt tone setter for the rest of the game. The offense was, in a word, anemic, and while they were able to break through with a bit of scoring late in the game, and while this was enough to get them to overtime and earn them the one standings point, there’s no doubt still that there were opportunities to pull away in this game left on the table.
And even in an immediate impression of how this one unfolded when it was all said and done, it was not hard to pinpoint where it went wrong.
“A lot of missed nets,” was head coach Rick Tocchet’s assessment after the game. “Blocked shots. You’ve got to be able to… you know there’s some skill to that, to be able to fake shots and go around people. It seems like you get struggling scoring goals [and] you’re, you just put your head down and shoot. So there’s got to be a little bit more skill when it comes to that. And then there was a sequence there where we had the puck a lot, we had about four missed chances, shots over the net. So that’s a thing we’ve got to keep working on.”
It’s no secret that the Flyers are in the midst of a difficult stretch — with just four wins through the whole month of January and a precipitous dropping down the standings looming, the Flyers have quickly found themselves in desperation time, but are struggling to balance the need to get back to their fundamentals of their game which will ground them with executing on some of the higher level plays which are equally necessary to helping them stack some wins. And chief among that is their ability to manufacture quality offense.
“There’s skill to that,” he went on. “I mean, it’s taking a little bit, there’s technique, taking a little bit off the shot. Sometimes when you have somebody going to the net, sometimes you don’t have to pick a corner, you’re looking for like a location shot, they call it, where there’s a rebound and somebody puts it in. Those are plays too. It’s hard to score from the blue line with nobody in front. You know, you’ve got to shoot the puck where you’re hitting the net where there’s a rebound, or somewhere you can get a retrieval. And that’s something we’ve been working on, and it’s experience, and things like that.”
The experience of it all
The note on managing these game situations well and coming through with better shot selections being a matter of experience in Tocchet’s eyes was, though, a bit of a strange one in some ways. After all, this Flyers’ lineup struggled pretty unilaterally to get the chances they were creating actually on net, and it’s not as though the veteran group saw the most efficiency there.
In fact, it was only four players in the lineup who, across all situations, were able to get half or more of their attempts on net, and they overwhelmingly came from the group of players aged 25 or younger — it was Noah Cates and Denver Barkey with one of two shots on goal, Jamie Drysdale with two of four, and then Matvei Michkov who got both of his two shot attempts on goal.
So, perhaps it is experience which might drive more success in this area over a longer term, but it was not their most experienced players who delivered their most efficient efforts last night.
All the same, whether experience is the difference maker or not, last night made it abundantly clear that there’s still quite a bit of tinkering that needs to go into the team’s approach to generating offense. Now, on the other side of the Olympic break, the schedule isn’t going to be lightening up any, and they’re not going to have the benefit of a wealth of practice time to polish things out, but the hope is that a bit of a reset from the time off, a return when things might feel a little less dire, can help them along as well.
All stats via Natural Stat Trick.
