Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Flyers fail again to hit .500 mark, hear home boos
PHILADELPHIA --- From beneath a pile of wasted chances, bad goals and incomplete power plays Monday, the Flyers could have heard something in the Wells Fargo Center.
They could have heard up to 19,645 blasts of verbal displeasure for a 4-2 loss to the Toronto Maple Leafs that is coming to define their sagging season.
They could have heard themselves being booed as they left the ice.
“I didn’t hear any, but obviously they have the right to do that,” Kimmo Timonen said. “We lost the game.”
They lost the game despite a goal and an assist from Jakub Voracek, the reigning NHL Player of the Week, and despite an elongated but ultimately mediocre power play late in the game.
Collapsing early in their own end, then trying too late to rally, the 9-11-1 Flyers lost for the second time in three games as they continue to fail to reach the .500 mark.
For them, a season that started late is
already in danger of ending early.
“There has been a lot of talk about .500,” head coach Peter Laviolette said. “But it’s not like we are shooting for .500. We’ve just got to get better. And it has to happen through this stretch of games where the home games favor us and there are not as many road games. It’s got to get to the point where we put together three out of four, or five out of six, or six out of seven, and start to get the win column going in the right direction so we can set ourselves up for the last third of the year and then a playoff push.”
The Flyers are 1-2 on a fivegame homestand, that coming after what seemed to have been season-reviving victories on Long Island and in Pittsburgh. Yet they have been inconsistent all season, even from period to period.
They fell behind, 2-0, Monday on a couple of ordinary Toronto goals, then spent the rest of the game trying to recover. In that, it was a mirror of the season.
After the Leafs built a 3-1 third-period lead, the Flyers had a premium chance to rally with 8:42 left. That’s when they delayed a holding penalty on James van Riemsdyk with nearly 30 seconds of sustained offense, then won a bonus opportunity when van Riemsdyk also drew a hooking penalty.
With up to four minutes of power-play time to use, Voracek scored within 24 seconds from Timonen and Claude Giroux to narrow the difference to 3-2. That sliced 1:36 from JVR’s fourminute sentence, yet kept the Flyers with the man advantage. They did not force the tie.
“I always hold myself to a pretty high standard,” said van Riemsdyk, before making his first return to Philadelphia as a visiting player. “It doesn’t matter where I’m playing. I want to produce and I want to be an attack player. Once you get traded you want to get off to a good start and go from there. We were kind of locked and loaded to go, and I was just happy to get the season started and get settled into Toronto.”
The Flyers trimmed a deficit to 2-1 at 17:56 of the second when their newer No. 1 line clicked. After being fed nicely by Giroux, Voracek charged in on the right side, drew some Toronto attention, and hit a rampaging Scott Hartnell. Hartnell fired his first goal of the season past Ben Scrivens, who had no time to react.
“We had some speed coming out from a good defensive play by Braydon Coburn,” said Hartnell, recently recovered from a broken bone in his foot. “Claude kicked it out to Jake, who has a lot of speed and can make plays. I was able to get a step on one of their defenders and Jake made the perfect pass. I just had to get it on net and it was able to go in.”
The Leafs took a 1-0 lead at 17:20 of the first when Phil Kessel muscled inside Timonen on the right wing and scored past the waving stick of Ilya Bryzgalov. Toronto doubled its lead in the second on an eerily similar goal, as Nikolai Kulemin broke in on the right side and backhanded his second goal of the season by a late-arriving Brayden Schenn and into the far side of Bryzgalov’s net.
The Leafs made it 3-1 with 12:08 left when Mikhail Grabovski scored from in front of Bryzgalov, who had just made successive sharp saves but was receiving too little defensive support.
Jay McClement scored an empty-net goal with 13 seconds to play to provide the final score.
“We need to learn to play 60 minutes a game,” Giroux said. “And that hurt us again tonight. It’s the same story. We need to play as a team and get four lines rolling and play a good 60.”
The Giroux line, with Voracek and Hartnell, has not been among the recent problems. Monday, Voracek extended his scoring streak to six games, and Giroux lengthened his to five.
But the Flyers too often buckled on defense, leaving Bryzgalov stranded.
“It’s a tough year for us,” Bryzgalov said. “We need to do lots of work and we need to play every day is like our last chance. Otherwise, we’re going to be watching the playoff games on the TV.”