The Philadelphia Flyers were hoping to start their season off with a bang, to prove to everyone that last year wasn’t an anomaly and they could very well be destined for back-to-back playoff appearances. Unfortunately, they came out with a whimper of a whimper, getting blown out at home 7-0 against the rival Pittsburgh Penguins.
It was a result that was as shocking as embarrassing and Flyers coach Rick Tocchet really had no explanation as to why it happened the way it did.
“I honestly don’t have an answer. I don’t think we won a battle. They outcoached us tonight. They outplayed us tonight. They did everything better than us tonight,” Tocchet said.
Tocchet isn’t lying. This wasn’t a blowout result that was a fairly close game but just one team had more bounces go their way. This was a full-on vicious attack from the Penguins and the Flyers sat in a corner flinching.
The Flyers were outshot 38-19 by game’s end and the Penguins had 21 high-danger scoring chances to the Flyers’ five, according to Natural Stat Trick. At 5-on-5, the Penguins had a 52-32 advantage in shot attempts, double the amount of unblocked shot attempts (44-22), outshot the Flyers a whopping 31-11, and had 79.8 percent of the expected goals share. It was pure domination and it was created from the Flyers’ own undoing in not being able to complete simple passes or just not completely break down defensively at the slightest bit of pressure.
“When we were down 4-0, even some plays we were making, just disturbing plays,” Tocchet said. “Obviously we’ve got to figure this out quickly. Since I’ve been here, it’s the worst D-zone I’ve ever seen. … Our D-zone is the pride, what we built on last year. Then we’re running around — the first couple of goals we lost three battles all against the wall. You just can’t do that if you want to be consistent in this league.”
The Flyers were doing one thing consistently in this game: Scrambling in their own zone and letting the Penguins walk all over them. Goaltender Dan Vladar had a bit of a rough game but considering the quantity and quality of chances that he faced, we’re fine not pinning most of the goals on him at all.
One Flyers defenseman put it perfectly, and is looking to erase it from everyone’s memory.
“That was about as ugly as it could have gotten,” Travis Sanheim said. “The fortunate thing is it’s Game 1 and we’ve got 83 more of these and we’re playing again tomorrow night.”
The captain shared a similar sentiment that the Flyers are looking to take the lessons from this game and apply them for the rest of the season, but it’s a long season and sometimes you have to go back to your roots of overperforming against better, more skilled teams.
“At some point, we’ve got to learn here, we’ve got to wake up,” Sean Couturier said. “The last exhibition game we played, it was the same way. Everyone’s like, ‘Oh, it’s training camp, we’re going to ease our way into the season.’ But we’ve got to wake up here.
“I mean, there’s no panic, nothing, but obviously we’ve got to realize that we’re not that good, what happened last year is last year and we’ve got to move on. It’s a fresh year and we’ve got to get back to outworking teams and trying to get points.”
Just like the Flyers captain, Tocchet also wasn’t accepting any excuse of the new training camp length being a whole lot shorter and having fewer preseason games to get ready for the season. The Flyers head coach did mention that he finds younger teams do need a longer training camp, while veteran teams don’t, so maybe we’re just seeing an extended camp now. Except these points matter.
Could we see a lineup change already?
Throughout training camp, Tocchet spoke on wanting to keep consistency in his lineup and being patient with his lines to build chemistry and giving them more opportunity to show something. Well, all it took was an embarrassing loss to step away from that, as he was changing lines throughout this season opener to try and find something.
He demoted Porter Martone to the fourth line after benching him for a bit, promoted Matvei Michkov up to the first line and all around the lineup. There were eight total different forward line combinations that Tocchet used on Wednesday night.
So, does a loss like this lead to already making some more permanent changes in the lineup?
“I just feel that to have offense you have to have the puck. We had chances to skate the puck in, but we’re just throwing pucks in and we just reset the puck to them,” Tocchet said. “If you’re not battling, it means you’re not battling offensively. You’re not willing to take the puck — we call it “Hunt the Hash” — hold on to the puck, make a play. That sort of stuff, instead of just throwing it somewhere. That’s a team that didn’t want to be engaged tonight.”
We can spend hours trying to decipher coachspeak but what we can gleam from that answer is that Tocchet just wants more creativity and dynamic plays throughout the entire lineup and his changes were to search for that. Maybe all it takes is the right combination of players to suddenly make a player more comfortable with making a play, or entering the zone with possession.
As mentioned, Martone is one player who didn’t have a great night and his minutes got cut because of it. So, what does that mean going forward?
“We just need him to do a few things. I just thought the first four or five shifts, he had a couple times where he could’ve gone through (Erik) Karlsson and he let up. And you can’t do that. His game is to play that style, a gritty style. He’s not going to go up the ice, flying around. … You just go with the guys you think are going.”
We’ll just have to wait and see if Tocchet does make any changes. The Flyers have an immediate chance to wipe the slate clean and let us forget about the stinker of a season opener as they head up to Newark to face the New Jersey Devils on Thursday night.
It was a bad result, but hopefully we can move on from this result.
“If we won 7-0, I’d say the same thing. ‘It’s a long year, we can’t get too high.’ We can’t get too low. You have to have that approach,” Tocchet said. “But, there’s were alarming things out there. We honestly didn’t win a battle. … It wasn’t good. Even the last two exhibition games, the same thing. We play like this tomorrow, with a team like Jersey, it’s going to be even worse so we have to be careful.”
Yeah, let’s hope that we don’t see this type of performance on Thursday night, or ever again.
