After their ugly shutout loss to the Hurricanes to open up the series down in Raleigh on Saturday, it was certain that the Flyers needed to take a beat to regroup and refine their approach to their game, if they wanted to keep this series, at the very least competitive. There wasn’t time enough for a complete overhaul, but there were lessons aplenty that could be taken from how the Flyers approached that game — and how other teams have approached the Hurricanes’ system and dealt with it more effectively — and changes implemented more quickly. It wasn’t going to be easy, but the Flyers still held enough of their fate in their own hands.
And, to their credit, the team that we saw come out for Game 2, right from the jump, looked markedly different than the team that made that first impression in the series opener. The pace was taken up to another level, and the Flyers looked more comfortable dealing with the forechecking pressure that the Hurricanes were bringing — they were more effective in making plays cleanly with pressure coming down on them, and indeed, they were able to turn that around really nicely at times, giving the Hurricanes a taste of their own medicine, as it were, by bearing down on them with speed and bringing a highly disruptive level of play. It was a stark reversal, and it served as a strong foundation from which the rest of their game came together more nicely.
They were moving up-ice more cleanly, which helped them to build up for more chances, and then two goals inside the first four minutes of the game had them feeling confident again, and had the Hurricanes on the ropes for the first time all postseason.
This wasn’t a perfect game for the Flyers, of course, and they had their fair share of moments in which they broke down within their structure (and were burned for that, on a pair of goals against) or made a head-scratching decision with the puck, but it was a game in which they were in the driver’s seat for long enough stretches. It was a game that, truly, they should have won.
The Flyers had their chances in this one, but the one thing that really took the wind out of their sails — and stop us if you’ve heard this one before — was their play on the power play. Now, it wasn’t all bad for them. For one, it was on the power play that they were able to break through for their first goal of the game, care of Jamie Drysdale, and on the whole the skaters looked more confident in their attempts to make plays, and were moving the puck around with more crispness and urgency. But, on the whole, for the Flyers’ power play units, it was a lot of flash in their slick puck moving and very little in the way of actual substance.
The Flyers were getting better puck movement, this much is true, but so much of it was happening on the outside, on the perimeters, and they still struggled to get interior and to cycle the puck lower in the zone for more dangerous chances. Relative to what one might expect in a game where they were given seven opportunities to work with on the man-advantage, the Flyers were able to generate staggeringly little in the way of chances. Across 12:21 of time up a man, the Flyers were able to generate just nine shot attempts and two high danger scoring chances (while conceding four against), and beyond the shot that would become Drysdale’s early goal, they generated just two more across their next six power plays.
And it goes without saying, but this level of ineffectiveness in these high-leverage playoff situations is just unacceptable. It’s rough to see players so skilled as these struggling to get it done on the man-advantage, but even more critically, it’s costing the Flyers games. Given the strength of the goaltending showing they were getting from Dan Vladar and the work their own penalty killers were doing to contain the Hurricanes’ power play, if they had been able to cash in on another one of those six power plays to restore their two-goal lead, there’s a good chance that would have been enough to secure them the win and give this series a very different feeling heading back to Philadelphia this week. The opportunity was in their hands, but they couldn’t do anything with it again.
At this point, there’s a bit of an acknowledgment of fighting a losing battle — the power play has been an issue all season, and it isn’t just going to suddenly snap into place in the eleventh hour here, and if the coaching staff had answers and fixes, they would have put them into place already. There are a lot of positives that will be taken from this playoff run — this run that the Flyers weren’t even supposed to be on in the first place — but the lack of production from a power play with more than enough talent to produce even a little bit of something will be a stain on this run.
All stats via Natural Stat Trick and the NHL.
