BOSTON — On this day one year ago, the Philadelphia Flyers kicked off a 10-game losing streak that would lead to the firing of their head coach, and the collapse of a once-promising season.
Yes, last year’s club was injury-ravaged. But it also tended to fold at even the first sign of adversity, turning potential victories into embarrassing losses.
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Thursday night’s 4-1 loss to the Boston Bruins sure felt a lot like 2021-22, and not just because the Flyers are now halfway to another double-digit skid. It was how the team lost — cutting a 2-0 deficit down to 2-1 in the third period, only to allow a third Bruins goal just 16 seconds later, and then totally lose its footing afterward.
Thus far in 2022-23, the Flyers — for all their flaws — have been a resilient club, regularly clawing their way back from early holes and poor starts. But with the losses piling up, old habits sure seem to be creeping back in.
“This team doesn’t understand what adversity is yet,” head coach John Tortorella said after the loss. “If this is adversity, and we can’t get through something like this … there’s going to be many different situations that are going to be harder to come through than this. This is a matter of a team just trying to fix things within ourselves.”
It makes sense that Tortorella believes this situation can be fixed. After all, he wasn’t here for the debacle that was 2021-22. But the similarities are starting to mount.
It’s the last one that really brings back bad memories of 2021-22. The blown line change on Sean Kuraly’s first period goal on Tuesday in Columbus screamed “Flyers of last season.” And on Thursday, the Ghost of November Past reared its unattractive head in the third period, after Owen Tippett had cut Boston’s lead down to 2-1 with a snipe of a goal.
Sixteen seconds later, a failed forecheck by the forwards, ill-advised pinch by Justin Braun, glaring turnover by Ivan Provorov and too-late backcheck by the other four skaters dashed any hope of a potential Philadelphia comeback, and knocked the wind out of the Flyers’ sails for the remainder of the contest.
“That team’s better than we are,” Tortorella said. “They’re better than we are, but that doesn’t mean we can’t beat them. To get yourself back into a game, and then have it come right back around to turn it to 3-1, we don’t give ourselves a chance. For us to become a better team, we can’t beat ourselves.”
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Surprisingly, Tortorella — while clearly disappointed and frustrated with the loss — wasn’t absolutely livid after the game. He defended Provorov, rather than rip him for the misplay.
“I mean, Provy’s trying, he’s played very well for us,” Tortorella said. “It’s just a bad play.”
He even chose not to throw the backcheckers under the bus, contending that they all assumed Provorov would win control of the puck, and in turn, they were justified in looking to head back up ice for a quick transition opportunity.
“It’s a tough play for those guys, because they think he’s gonna have the puck, and we’re trying to play north, we’re trying to play quick,” he explained. “So they think he has the puck or is going to get it, so it’s a tough bang-bang play there.”
In fact, Tortorella wasn’t interested in pointing fingers at anyone in the wake of the defeat.
“There’s no sense in putting blame on people. It’s not one particular play,” Tortorella said.
And perhaps Tortorella is right. Boston, after all, has been the NHL’s best team in 2022-23 — it’s not like a loss to the Bruins in their building is embarrassing on its face. The Flyers’ underlying play had been trending upward prior to Thursday night. And as Scott Laughton contended in the wake of the defeat, last year’s club and this one are far different in terms of overall feel.
“I don’t think it creeps in too much, I think we have too many new faces for that, and too many new guys,” Laughton said. “Our energy’s been good on the bench — it’s been different this year, I’ll tell you that. I don’t think we feel out of it. Even tonight, we score a big power play goal, obviously they score after, but there’s still belief on the bench, guys want to do well, and are there for each other and blocking shots, things like that.”
In Tortorella’s mind, the Flyers’ biggest problem is more of a big-picture issue.
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“We’re just not making enough plays. We have to be able to make more plays,” he said. “We’re going to make mistakes checking. We’re going to have struggles sometimes in our end zone. Our goaltending’s going to have to be really good. But we’ve got to get some pressure off our team, to when plays are there, we need to make more. It’ll give us a chance to have the puck more, and maybe score more goals. We’re gonna have to turn into one hell of a checking team. I don’t think we’re going to be able to be that good to win games 1-0 and 2-1. We’re going to have to find a way to make more plays to get going offensively.
And Tortorella even couched that criticism with a familiar explanation — or excuse, depending upon your perspective.
“It’s hard to answer a question of who we are until we get some damn players back,” he said. “And my complaint about making plays, some of those guys make plays that are out. So we’ve got to be really careful how we judge the hockey club. I’ve got to be really careful about staying patient with this, until we really find out who we are, when we get a few important guys that are out.”
But there’s an obvious problem with the “just wait until we get healthy” line of thinking on Tortorella’s part, which makes it more of a rhetorical deflection than an actual plan: there’s no guarantee they’ll be getting those key players back. Sure, van Riemsdyk should be back soon enough, and Wade Allison avoided major injury last weekend. But Ellis very well might never play again. Couturier is out until at least late February, and there’s no guarantee how he might look after his second back surgery. Atkinson has only appeared on the ice in Columbus — hinting that he’s likely spending most of his time there, and not at the Flyers’ facility — and even if his mysterious ailment cleared up tomorrow, he’d still need to spend at least a few weeks on conditioning before being cleared for game action, given that he missed almost all of training camp and the first month of the season.
In other words, reinforcements aren’t coming to bail out the Flyers. They’re going to need to fix this on their own.
And that’s where the two situations — the 2021-22 skid and this one — are most comparable. Both then and now, the Flyers were dealing with less-than-ideal circumstances, and they simply allowed their struggles to snowball, until three losses became five, became seven, became 10.
“It’s not fun, but all we can do now is forget about it, focus on the next one, and have a short memory. That’s all you can do,” Joel Farabee said Thursday night.
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Both Tortorella and the players seem confident that this losing streak won’t turn into a repeat of the one that began 12 months ago. Only time will tell if they’re right.
Assorted observations
- The Flyers very well might be down another key player. Konecny, their top scorer, clipped his right hand on David Pastrnak late in the second period and did not return for the rest of the game. Tortorella had no update from the trainers in the immediate aftermath of the game, but it didn’t look good in real time.
- Philadelphia’s recent penalty kill woes continued, as they allowed the Bruins to score on two of their four opportunities. Over the past four games, the Flyers have only successfully killed four of 11 power plays, good for a hideous 36.4 percent success rate. Yikes.
- One bright spot was that Tippett lit the lamp once again, and it was via the kind of distance snipe that he seemed incapable of scoring last season. Tippett’s dramatic increase in confidence continues to be abundantly clear.
- Give Noah Cates credit. He spent nearly half of his five-on-five ice time in a direct head-to-head matchup against Patrice Bergeron, yet held the reunited Perfection Line off the scoreboard and finished with a strong 70.94 percent expected goals share across all of his minutes. Cates found a way to thrive despite an exceedingly difficult assignment.
- Carter Hart may have finished the game with an ugly .875 save percentage, but don’t be fooled — he made numerous big saves and didn’t really have much of a chance on any of the goals, particularly the two power play tallies. “That’s a good team there, but Hartsy gave us a chance like always,” Laughton said after the loss. He wasn’t wrong.
- Linus Ullmark may have made just 22 saves, but he was stellar in goal, particularly in the first period, when the Flyers generated multiple Grade-A opportunities. Before the Flyers cracked defensively in the third period, this was looking like a real goaltender’s duel.
- Out of all the teams I’ve watched so far this season, no team has checked the Flyers tighter than the Bruins did. It’s easy to see why they have the NHL’s best record — they’re a suffocating defensive group.
- Per Natural Stat Trick, Zack MacEwen led the Flyers in high-danger chances with three. Good for MacEwen, but that’s seemingly part of the problem — he shouldn’t be the forward generating the most chances on the team.
- Patrick Brown made his return to the lineup in the wake of offseason back surgery, largely playing right wing on the fourth line.
All statistics courtesy of Evolving-Hockey and Natural Stat Trick.
(Photo: Fred Kfoury III / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
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