Laviolette, Flyers making adjustments

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Peter Laviolette cant guarantee his team will display perfect defense in front of the net Saturday night against Carolina.

He cant guarantee his goalie, Ilya Bryzgalov, will be entirely comfortable after what happened on Thursday night against Winnipeg.

Lavy wont guarantee anything. But
Im pretty sure well win again, the coach says, coming off the heels of a 9-8 loss to the Jets that might have been entertaining, but lacked for strong systems play.

Throughout the NHL, it was a presumed the Flyers would run into a rough stretch with eight or nine new faces on the roster, trying to find consistent chemistry.

Yet when the Flyers sailed through pre-season and the first, four games of the regular season, well, it seemed there were no issues at all.

Now there are. Adjustments will be made in terms of personnel and strategy. The Flyers are looking more like the work in progress people predicted they would resemble back in August.

Most teams, at times through the course of the year, go through patches and spots where you look at things and you get better and try to work on things, Laviolette said.

You grow as a team. Were there right now. If you take a little bit of adversity and try to overcome that as a group, you can grow as a group.

Someone suggested it may take months. Laviolette laughed.

I hope not months, he replied. Theres no question, the expectation was to win Thursday. We continue to grow on the ice and off the ice. As I mentioned early, whether you like it or not, sometimes that growing has to do with Thursday.

We then take the next step from there with regard to a new team and a young team. That builds a little and helps build your team.

Thats the attitude going into tonights game against the Hurricanes.

Bryzgalov will be back in goal.

Anyone who plays in that game, you want to get out there, Laviolette said of his goalie.
The only way to fix things is to go out work hard and feel good about what youve done.

It starts anew tonight.

"That's the beauty of the sport," Wayne Simmonds said. "There's the next game."

E-mail Tim Panaccio at tpanotch@comcast.net

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