With a 4-1 lead and all the momentum in the world, the Flyers had Thursday night’s game against the Pittsburgh Penguins in their hands after the first period, said captain Claude Giroux.

But then the second period began.

“We came out flat,” Giroux said. “And it cost us another two points.”

The Flyers, who were feeling good and confident after their effort during the first 20 minutes against the Pens, should have hit the ice for the second period with the same energy and killer instinct they had in the stanza that preceded it. But instead, they sat back, allowing their rivals to swiftly chip away at their lead and tie up the game. The Penguins went on to win, 5-4 (see game recap).

“The second period was not a good period,” coach Peter Laviolette said. “It was the opposite of the first period. In the first period, we were skating, we were physical, we put the puck behind them and looked to establish our game. And in the second period, they picked up their game, we stopped working. The second period went to them.”

After their promising start, the Flyers surrendered second-period goals to Pascal Dupuis, James Neal and Tyler Kennedy. They stopped working, allowing the Penguins to send 12 shots in on Ilya Bryzgalov compared to the mere three they had on Tomas Vokoun. It was the first time since 1987 against the New York Islanders that the Flyers allowed an opponent to erase a three-goal lead in the span of a single period.

But why?

“I don’t know,” Giroux said.

Thursday night was yet another example -- albeit magnified -- of the Flyers’ inability to put in complete, 60-minute efforts. They were guilty of it just two days ago in New York, in a game against the Rangers in which a 2-2 third-period tie devolved into a 4-2 Flyers' loss. They’ve talked about the issue all season, and they had certainly talked about it heading into the Penguins affair.

But to Kimmo Timonen, it’s not a matter of poor defense or weak goaltending or a struggling forecheck, though there were instances of all three in Thursday’s second period. It’s something else, something unfortunately much harder to correct.

“When you have a 4-1 lead, the game is in your hands, big time,” Timonen said. “The crowd’s just into it. But what happened in the second period, we go on the ice, we’re not there for some reason. And that’s the mental issue to me.”

That belief -- that the Flyers’ issue in the second period was more mental than anything else -- is a big part of why Laviolette elected to pull Bryzgalov from the game after Kennedy’s game-tying marker.

Yes, Bryzgalov was part of the problem, but he wasn’t removed solely because he struggled to make the 12 saves he did put in. Laviolette needed to do something to wake up the skaters in front of Bryzgalov. He needed to do something to attempt to recapture the game’s momentum.

“It was a big letdown,” Scott Hartnell said. “I don’t know why we would have stopped playing the way we were in the first period, we were fast, we were quick, we were hitting, we were getting into the extra-curricular activities after the whistles, and playing Flyers hockey.

“And then we just sat back. When you do that, you got [Evgeni] Malkin and [Sidney] Crosby and these guys that are snipers that make plays, and if we play like that it’ll be a long summer.”

The Penguins do deserve credit for not rolling over and giving away an easy two points. But unlike the Flyers, who seem able to identify their problems but unable to fix them, the Penguins regrouped during the first intermission and set themselves straight on the ice in the period that followed.

“I don’t think we could have got much worse after the first period, so I think we could only go up from there,” said Neal, the Penguins’ left wing. “But a few guys said a few things, and we just knew we needed to be better. … We wanted to come back out and do what we need to do.”
 
With the loss, the Flyers slipped into 11th place in the Eastern Conference. And in a big way, the difference between Thursday’s first period and second period perfectly exemplifies the highs and lows of this messy, disappointing 2013 season as a whole.

It’s easy to point fingers at Laviolette, to suggest his message is getting stale and that this -- not the players on the ice -- is the real reason behind the team's struggles. But even after Thursday’s frustrating second period and ugly loss, Hartnell held firm that the coach is not to blame for what happened.

But if he isn’t, who is?
    
“The whole team,” Zac Rinaldo said. “The whole team has to come together and give a 60-minute effort. It’s not one person, it’s not two people. It’s the whole team. The whole team has to be prepared for 60 minutes.”