Saturday, May 7, 2011
Posted: 12:45 p.m.
By Tim Panaccio
CSNPhilly.com
They were outscored 20-7 in the Boston series and 38-29 overall in the playoffs.
The general manager, Paul Holmgren, and the coach, Peter Laviolette, say publicly their goaltending wasnt a culprit.
Yet the stats speak for themselves. Their team goals against average was 3.33 and the team save percentage was a horrid .889.
How embarrassing that David Krejcis line with Milan Lucic and Nathan Horton single-handedly outscored the entire Flyers roster in the series with eight goals, 11 assists for 19 points.
None of the above, each taken by itself, would allow you to pinpoint exactly why the Flyers were unceremoniously swept out of the Eastern Conference semifinals in four games.
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Yet taken as a whole, they tell a story of a team that played poorly much of the second half of the season, made a slight recovery, then got to the playoffs and burned itself out in a grueling seven-game series with Buffalo.
The Flyers looked gassed, at times, against Boston and were driven into submission by a fresher, stronger Bruins team that won most of the individual battles in two of the four games in the series.
Laviolette likes to be honest when he dissects losses. Honesty here means admitting your goaltending wasnt good enough to steal a gameor even get a shutout this season in 93 games played.
It means admitting the Flyers were inexplicably flat at the start of games throughout the season and even in the playoffs.
It also means admitting Boston pounded the Flyers in two of the four games. Its usually the other way around. Thats a trademark of the Flyersnot the Bruins.
We just tried to get it in deep and work them down low, tire them out, and thats what we did, Bruins defenseman Johnny Boychuk said.
We just wanted to get pucks deep. We didnt want a turnover at the blue lines, the red lines. We wanted to make sure to get it in deep and go after them. And we did.
Thats how it ends for the Flyers a year after they came back from a 3-0 deficit on Boston and went on that magnificent run to the Stanley Cup Final.
I think in all the losses, we needed to generate more, Laviolette said. We need to spend more time in the offensive zone. Defensively, even Friday, we turned some pucks over in the neutral zone trying to get through their trap and trying to get a sustained forecheck that could generate some offense and we werent able to do that.
In the losses that seems to be one of the key things it factors in. The other thing for me, looking back on the series, you have an opportunity in Game 1. You are in your building and we dont play the way Game 2 we played hard.
We did the things we wanted to do. We lost in overtime. It was a tough bounce and a tough break. But that happens in the playoffs and I really look at Game 1 as an opportunity that was lost for us to get into the series. We never seem to get into it. We didnt get a win. We didnt get in the series. In game one, that was a blown opportunity.
One factor that needs mentioning is what impact playing 198 games over two years had on the club. Its not unusual for Cup Finalists to fade the following season as the playoffs grow deep.
Chicago won the Cup and the Hawks got rubbed out in the first round. Coincidence? Dont think so. Since 2000, only Pittsburgh, Detroit and New Jersey made the Cup Final in two consecutive years.
It is hard to say, Laviolette said. I dont have a scale to measure that. Certainly last year, the objective was to go as far as you can. I dont know if there is any way to measure whether it did or didnt have a difference in how we play.
At the All-Star break, the Flyers were the No. 1 team in the NHL. From that point on, their team gamefrom goaltending to special teams to defensive playall began to whittle away, little by little.
The Flyers of January werent the same Flyers come April. Yes, injuries played a huge factorChris Prongers absence (backhamstring), but overall, the Flyers just werent as sharp when the playoffs began as they should have been.
The defense didnt raise its game in Prongers absence.
Additionally, team captain Mike Richards, who seemed detached during many games during the regular season, had a poor playoff, especially in the faceoff circle, an area of his game no one ever questioned before.
When the one player, deemed as the hardest working face of the franchise by management, loses so many one-on-one battles and seems emotionally withdrawn, thats a cause for concern that needs to be addressed in the off-season.
Collectively, how much of the Flyers mental and physical energy was sapped in having to constantly come from behind in games or waiting for their backs to be against the wall before responding to on-ice challenges, remains a point of debate.
In the playoffs last year, the Flyers thrived on coming back. To a man, they thought they could turn it on this spring, as well. They were wrong.
Yeah, I think its hard to always come back and we always put ourselves in a bad situation, Claude Giroux said.
Giroux went into the weekend leading the NHL in playoff assists with 11 while James van Riemsdyk was tied for the lead in playoff goals with seven.
Ideally, you dont want to start from behind but that kind of was our own fault maybe for not coming out ready to play and maybe not playing the game the right way at the start, JVR said.
A lot more will be said next week when the team holds its break-up day and in the months ahead as management looks for ways to guarantee a collapse like this one doesnt happen again.
A by-product of that decision will focus on who from this group, which was mostly intact from last years Cup Final roster, will be traded or left unsigned moving forward.
E-mail Tim Panaccio at tpanotch@comcast.net
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