Recent weeks have seen the Flyers spend differing amounts of time without their three most important forwards. Center Sean Couturier missed a couple of weeks in February with what appeared to be a foot issue, captain Claude Giroux was out for three games with what was probably a concussion, and top winger Jakub Voracek is now out with what also looks like a foot injury.
It’s been unfortunate for the Flyers’ still-existent playoff chances, and even moreso when you consider how remarkably healthy each of those three guys had been in the past few years before this season.
| Games Missed | 2012-13 | 2013-14 | 2014-15 | 2015-16 (thru January) | February 2016 |
| Voracek | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 |
| Giroux | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 3 |
| Couturier | 2 | 0 | 0 | 9 | 9 |
Given the problems the Flyers have had icing a good bottom-6 for much of the year, you would think this would sinking their play on ice and their hopes in the standings. Relying too much on the overall unimpressive group of skaters the Flyers have beyond their very top guys is probably not something that one should expect to work out well.
Yet that’s not what’s happened. The Flyers posted a 8-4-3 record in February — a 63.3% points percentage, which actually sits above their season average of 55.6%. Certainly, it’s above what expectations likely would be for a team that’s seen its best players miss time during that stretch.
And they aren’t exactly fluking their way to these wins — in fact, February was the Flyers’ best month in terms of even-strength score-adjusted possession yet this season.
| Month | S-A Corsi For % (NHL Rank) | S-A Fenwick For % (NHL Rank) |
| October | 47.5% (26) | 47.1% (25) |
| November | 48.9% (17) | 47.2% (22) |
| December | 49.8% (19) | 49.1% (21) |
| January | 49.8% (17) | 49.6% (17) |
| February | 50.2% (15) | 52.2% (7) |
(Numbers above, and elsewhere in this article, via war-on-ice.com unless otherwise noted.)
So how did the Flyers power through despite missing at least one of Couturier, Giroux, and Voracek in every game they’ve played since February 6? By way of the other forwards on the roster — guys who are now playing their best hockey of the season.
Early-season depth problems
Claude Giroux is obviously an outstanding NHL center, and Sean Couturier’s play this year has been so good that he’d probably be looking at a Selke Trophy nomination had he not missed 18 games with various ailments. The Flyers have come to expect excellence when either one of them is on the ice, and given that they are the team’s top two centers and essentially are never on the ice at the same time, the Flyers can expect at least good if not great on-ice performance in over half of their 5-on-5 ice time because of these two, provided that they are both healthy.
Yet, as the chart above shows, the Flyers as a team never found themselves breaking even in possession until this past month. Why? Because when neither of those two was on the ice, the Flyers were routinely getting completely caved in by whoever the other team was trotting out.
Since Giroux and Couturier do not play together*, we can divide the Flyers’ season up by month and show the team’s score-adjusted Corsi during each month in three groups: when Giroux is on the ice, when Couturier is on the ice, and neither of them is on the ice (in other words, everything else). And for a baseline, we’ll include the team’s total possession numbers within each month as well, as well as the combined numbers between Giroux and Couturier.
| Month | Giroux | Couturier | Either 28 or 14 | Neither | Team Total |
| October | 52.4% | 47.0% | 50.6% | 45.0% | 47.5% |
| November | 52.9% | 60.0% | 56.2% | 39.9% | 48.9% |
| December | 52.2% | 51.4% | 51.8% | 47.0% | 49.8% |
| January | 53.2% | 53.8% | 53.4% | 45.5% | 49.8% |
| Oct – Jan Total | 52.7% | 54.2% | 53.4% | 44.1% | 49.0% |
We left February off for a reason. We’ll get to that later. In the meantime, let’s break down the implications of this chart, in question-and-answer form.
So when neither of Giroux or Couturier was on the ice, prior to February, the Flyers were a 44 percent possession team. Is that bad?
It is, in fact, bad. Let’s try and quantify just how bad.
Back in December, TSN’s Travis Yost wrote about how much better NHL teams are at evaluating their forward talent than they are their defensive talent. That post included this graph, which shows the average Corsi-For of each team’s first, second, etc., all the way down to 12th-most-frequent forward.
Yost’s point here was to show that, by and large, teams give the most ice time to their best possession-driving players. Which is what you’d hope to see. For now, though, let’s focus on the right side of the graph. On average, each team’s 12th forward (in other words, the forward on each team who gets the least ice time on average) had a Corsi-For percentage just a touch above 47 percent.
Which means that, whenever neither of their top two centers were on the ice, through the first few months of the year the Flyers were getting outshot at a level much worse than the amount by which the average team’s worst forward gets outshot. That’s a 9.3 percent difference from the percentage of attempts the Flyers got with either of Couturier or Giroux on the ice — nearly twice as big as the roughly five percent difference you can see between the No. 1 and No. 12 forwards on Yost’s graph above.
So yes. That’s bad. And with at least one of Giroux or Couturier out for 11 of the Flyers’ 15 February games, the Flyers were looking at seeing that kind of play of forwards represent three of their four forward lines. Any one of those injuries very well could have totally sunk them.
But it didn’t sink them. They won over half of their games in February and have stayed in the playoff race. Right?
They did! And they have!
How did that happen?
It happened because the non-Giroux, non-Couturier supporting cast stepped up big time in the month of February.
Let’s update that table from earlier, this time comparing the Flyers’ pre-February possession numbers to their February numbers.
| Month | Giroux | Couturier | Either 28 or 14 | Neither | Team Total |
| Oct – Jan Total | 52.7% | 54.2% | 53.4% | 44.1% | 49.0% |
| February | 48.2% | 57.2% | 51.2% | 49.6% | 50.2% |
The Flyers have played roughly 675 minutes, give or take a few seconds, of 5-on-5 ice time in the month of February. Of those minutes, they have had neither Giroux or Couturier on the ice for approximately 441 of them (just under two-thirds of their total ice time). In those minutes, the Flyers have nearly fought their opponents to a territorial draw, to the tune of 49.6 percent of score-adjusted possession.
This is, by far, the best single-month performance of the season for the Flyers’ depth/non-top-forwards. In fact, it’s only slightly below what the team did with Giroux or Couturier on the ice in the month, due in large part to a sudden drop-off in Giroux’s numbers. (We’ll talk about that in a bit.)
Now, 49.6 percent may not sound all that great – and it isn’t. But remember, we’re talking about what’s essentially the Flyers’ bottom-6 (even though, for most of this month, the team’s “bottom-6 forwards” were spread across three lines due to injuries). If you take another look at Yost’s graph above, the average team’s bottom-6 is going to be below that mark. For the Flyers to be where they are in this category – especially considering the struggles the same group has had for months now – represents a remarkable improvement.
Put another way: had the Flyers played at their pre-February clip of 44.1 percent possession without either of Couturier and Giroux, and had Couturier and Giroux played at the level they actually did when they were on the ice, the Flyers would have been around 46.6 percent in score-adjusted possession. That’d be their worst single-month performance of the year, and there’s a pretty good chance they’d have missed out on a few more points and would be facing long-shot playoff odds instead of the roughly coin-flip odds they face today.
So if you’re looking for a reason why the Flyers’ possession numbers have been climbing without their top two centers, this is why. The Flyers’ depth forwards have gone from a huge liability for the season’s first four months to a positive in recent weeks, and it picked the Flyers up at a time where they needed it most.
So who’s responsible for this improvement?
Everyone. Seriously — almost every forward on the roster has seen their play without the Flyers’ top forwards improve this month, and many of them substantially so.
With some help from puckalytics.com’s Super WOWY tool, let’s look at each Flyers forward’s 5-on-5 Corsi-For percentage** away from Giroux and Couturier this season, prior to February and then in February, and see how much they’ve improved in this month.
| Player | 5v5 non-28-or-14 CF% (pre-February) | 5v5 non-28-or-14 CF% (February) | Improvement |
| Schenn | 40.3% | 51.1% | +10.8% |
| Simmonds | 46.6% | 54.7% | +8.1% |
| Raffl | 48.6% | 54.5% | +5.8% |
| Read | 48.9% | 54.5% | +5.5% |
| Laughton | 45.9% | 51.0% | +5.1% |
| Gagner | 47.1% | 50.2% | +3.2% |
| White | 45.0% | 45.6% | +0.6% |
| Cousins | 50.0% | 49.8% | -0.2% |
| Voracek | 45.6% | 44.8% | -0.8% |
| Umberger | 45.0% | 43.9% | -1.1% |
| VandeVelde | 44.7% | 43.2% | -1.5% |
| Bellemare | 45.6% | 42.6% | -2.9% |
There’s a lot to take away from this table. Here’s what sticks out:
- Brayden Schenn’s struggles in the earlier part of this season were maybe being understated a bit, based on his outright ghastly possession numbers away from the Flyers’ top forwards. But his work in this month — especially in recent weeks with Wayne Simmonds and Sam Gagner, who both also have pretty flattering numbers in this chart — is a tremendous improvement, and is probably the closest he’s come in his five-year NHL career to showing he can be the best player on a line that’s successfully pushing play. Functionally, it may not mean a ton moving forward, in the sense that Schenn will often be alongside Giroux when the captain is healthy. But it’s still very encouraging to see from one of the Flyers’ still-young pieces.
- Another young piece that’s really stepped up this month is Scott Laughton. It’s true that he’s looked more comfortable in the past five or so games since Dave Hakstol moved him out to the wing, but even before that switch happened, he’d been playing with more confidence in the earlier part of this month, and his boosted numbers reflect that. Surely it can’t hurt that he’s spent a lot of time with neutral-zone maven Matt Read and possession dynamo Michael Raffl — both guys who, as you can see, have also seen their numbers shoot up in this month — but those two alone can’t get all of the credit for what appears to be genuine development from Laughton after a disappointing first half of the season.
- Nick Cousins‘ numbers actually drop off slightly in the table above — the pre-February numbers were based on his brief 4-game cameo from around Thanksgiving — but he’s clearly taken on more responsibility in his current stint with the club. He, too, has done good work alongside Laughton, and Hakstol is starting to trust him with more minutes based on that work. Cousins’ call-up initially was meant to support the forward group when Couturier was injured back in early February, but the fact that Giroux and Couturier are both healthy and that Cousins is still getting third-line ice time shows where the coaching staff sees him right now.
- R.J. Umberger has only played in six games in February. While it hasn’t all been bad for him — he’s actually posted four points in those six games despite bottom-six ice time — it’s tough to deny that replacing him with other options has worked out well for the Flyers from a possession standpoint.
- Finally, let’s all acknowledge that this group-wide improvement has happened despite the VandeVelde/Bellemare/White line not being broken up and still performing at roughly the same levels it has been all year. Apologies for beating a dead horse here, but it is still puzzling that this group is completely immune to any lineup changes./
So the improvement is great, but is it sustainable? Should we expect to see this the rest of the year?
It’s entirely possible that some guys have been playing over their head in the past four weeks. Read and Simmonds, for instance, probably did not magically become 54-plus-percent possession players overnight. Laughton making this big of a leap certainly raises some eyebrows after his rough first few months. And Schenn suddenly appearing capable of carrying a line after not being able to do so in the first 4.5 years of his career may well just be a blip on the radar.
But we’re also talking about a team that is being coached by a first-year NHL coach, one that is growing increasingly comfortable with his system and coaching. And many of the players being discussed (Laughton, Cousins, even Schenn) are young enough that legitimate strides forward aren’t out of the question, while others (Read, Raffl, Gagner) have track records of being solid NHL possession players.
At the very least, it seems hard to imagine the Flyers falling back to where they were in the first part of the season. Even if some clunkers and regression may be inevitable (Monday’s game against Calgary comes to mind here), there are enough positive signs here to suggest that the Flyers’ support forwards will be able to avoid getting totally blown off the ice like they were through January. Even if they can just stay at the level of an average NHL bottom-6, that should be more than good enough given how good Giroux and Couturier are.
But wait, with Giroux and Couturier healthy and with the Bellemare line set in stone, how many of these guys can really get bottom-6 ice time if everyone is healthy?
That’s the real wild card here.
With Voracek expected to be out for two weeks, the lines as they are currently set allow almost all of the players who’ve shown improvement — Gagner, Read, Laughton, etc. — to stay in the lineup. As it is now, Schenn and Simmonds will likely play alongside Giroux while Gagner and Raffl are alongside Couturier. With Umberger in the press box and Jordan Weal unlikely to crack the lineup any time soon even when he gets healthy, this leaves Laughton/Cousins/Read together to hopefully keep up their strong play of late.
The big decisions will come when Voracek is healthy. When faced with the decision of having to scratch one of these forwards who’s played much better of late, will Hakstol finally break apart the VandeVelde/Bellemare/White grind line that seems to be made of teflon?
Based on what he’s done this year, it seems most likely that Sam Gagner will be moved to the press box, given that the team hasn’t liked playing him in the bottom-6 all year. And that’d be a shame. We can only hope that these guys keep playing well before Voracek returns — not only because that’d obviously be good for the team, but because it’d make the decision to scratch one of them that much tougher.
One other question — are you just talking about the non-Giroux forwards to distract us from the fact that Giroux’s possession numbers dropped way off in February? Should we be worried about that?
Probably not. Giroux’s possession numbers did indeed worsen in February after four months of remarkable consistency, which certainly is curious. But it’s worth noting that the negative numbers were fueled by one particularly horrendous game — the Flyers’ 5-1 win over Buffalo on February 11, in which Giroux was a 21.5% score-adjusted possession player. While hand-waving away any one data point isn’t advisable, the body of work Giroux has put together suggests it’s not something to worry about.
Still, let’s humor this for a second. According to BSH‘s Charlie O’Connor, up through the February 19 game against Montreal (the game after which Giroux would miss three games), Giroux’s neutral zone score in February (in other words, the unblocked possession figures you’d expect with him on the ice based on the team’s neutral zone performance) was 50.11%. For the first four months of the season, Giroux’s neutral zone score was 52.19%.
That’s certainly a drop-off. And given that neutral zone performance is the one that’s subject to the least amount of randomness, it could raise some eyebrows. But even then, to believe that Giroux has suddenly become a middling possession player long-term, you’d have to a) believe that the 10 games Giroux played between February 1 and 19 represent a meaningful break from the multiple seasons of evidence that we have suggesting he’s a good neutral zone player, and that b) Giroux suddenly became a below-average player in either the offensive or defensive zone, or both.
Is it possible? I guess. But I’d still lean pretty heavily towards “not much to be worried about here”, especially given Giroux’s strong play in the two games to close out the month after his return from injury.
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Conclusion
Through the first four months of the year, the Flyers were almost entirely held together at 5-on-5 by their top two lines, with the team posting truly porous possession numbers with neither of Claude Giroux or Sean Couturier on the ice. And with Couturier and Giroux both missing time in February with injuries, it wouldn’t have been surprising to see the bottom fall out — and to see the Flyers’ playoff hopes go with it.
Instead, the Flyers’ depth forwards have come up with by far their best play of the season. Huge steps forward by Brayden Schenn, Matt Read, Scott Laughton, Sam Gagner, and Michael Raffl are the biggest reason why the Flyers’ playoff chances right now are as strong right now as they were at the All-Star Break, if not stronger. Even with the struggles of the Pierre-Edouard Bellemare line accounted for, the Flyers played at the level of an above-average bottom-6 when neither of their two top centers were on the ice.
If those players can keep up their strong play of late or even stay close to it, and if Giroux and Couturier play at the level they’ve been at for most of the season, then the Flyers’ chances at a playoff spot are suddenly looking that much better, no matter what questions they may have on the blue line.
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* According to stats.hockeyanalysis.com, Giroux and Couturier have spent 2:51 together this season, and the Flyers had one shot attempt for and two against during that time.
** These numbers are not score-adjusted due to limitations on puckalytics.com options. However, given the fact that the Flyers have led more than they have trailed in February, and that as such their score-adjusted numbers in the month are actually higher than their unadjusted numbers, it is unlikely that adjusting for score would change these numbers substantially for the worse. If anything, they may actually be understating the improvement the Flyers have seen.
