It doesn’t look like we’ll see the end of the Sean Couturier Healthy Scratch Debacle anytime soon.
The Philadelphia Flyers are in Raleigh visiting the Carolina Hurricanes for some Thursday night action and after they handed the Toronto Maple Leafs a demoralizing 4-3 defeat on Tuesday without their captain Couturier, it appears that head coach John Tortorella will keep the same group on the ice.
After being a healthy scratch for the first time ever in his multi-decade career, Couturier will be out of the lineup for a second consecutive game.
At morning skate, as the forward lines started to take shape, it looks like Tortorella will be keeping the same four lines together and keeping the “fifth line” as is. All three of Couturier, Denis Gurianov, and Cam Atkinson will serve as healthy scratches, along with defenseman Marc Staal — who is in the lineup due to Travis Sanheim taking the practice off for some maintenance.
In a vacuum, keeping the exact same lineup the game after earning a hard-fought victory over one of the league’s best teams, makes all the sense in the world. We were just personally hoping to get over this late-season fiasco that has been a team unexpectedly deep in the hunt for the playoffs, purposefully leaving their captain off the ice.
The exact reason why Tortorella has scratched Couturier has not been explained by anyone connected to the team, but according to a recent source, it has been a “pace issue” that the bench boss has found in the center’s game as of late. That explanation at least gives us some reason as to why this is happening. It could be that; it could be needing a rest and the team doesn’t want it to be made public; or it could just be for something we have not even thought of yet.
It will just keep on happening for the foreseeable future, we suppose. Especially now that it is has reached the stage of happening for multiple consecutive games.
