by Bob Herpen
Phanatic Hockey Editor
It has been exactly 31 days since the Philadelphia Flyers began their post-Olympic schedule, trying desperately to make up enough ground to snap a five-year postseason drought.
The latest cliffhanger in the season-long soap opera was an easy 5-1 result against the Chicago Blackhawks roughly 40 hours ago. Thanks to multi-point efforts by Noah Cates, Alex Bump and Owen Tippett along with 25 saves from Sam Ersson, that one little victory was the 10th for the club since the resumption of play, with a balance of 5 wins each coming against division/conference opponents and out-of-conference foes.
Heading into the first of three leftover games against the Red Wings tonight in Detroit, the math still isn’t quite mathing for extended play in April despite Rick Tocchet leading his charges to a 10-4-1 mark – the single best 15-game stretch at any point this season - only eclipsed by a 10-4-2 run between Nov. 4 to Dec. 9.
Yes, the Flyers currently sit 5 points behind the New York Islanders, who currently occupy the final playoff berth in the East. Yes, they have two games in hand vs. the Isles and one in hand over Ottawa. But before they look toward Long Island, they have to overtake both the Wings and Sens while simultaneously hoping for a collapse by all three rivals and maintaining their torrid run.
To quote the late, great Judy Tenuta, it could happen. Could might be good enough at the start of a baseball season. It's nothing to hang a hat on at the end of a hockey season.
Just for the sake of clarification, the Flyers have not been, and are not now, in a playoff race. They're in a playoff chase.
The logic is simple: "race" implies the club began this stretch among the top eight teams in the East and would play their remaining slate to either maintain their position or improve it; "chase" implies a standing outside the top eight and subsequent efforts are focused on producing as many points as possible to gain ground on other teams and crack the top eight qualifiers.
That's where they are now.
Heading into action on Feb. 25 in Washington, the Orange and Black were 25-20-11 for 61 points, good enough for 13th in the conference and 8 points out of eighth spot. Fifty-one days earlier, after a 5-2 win over the Anaheim Ducks on home ice, they were 22-12-7 (51 pts.), comfortably nestled in sixth place overall.
Over those 7-plus weeks, the home squad stumbled to a dismal 3-9-4 record, with their performance in many of those games more dismal than final scores would indicate, regardless of the impact of injuries, matchups and the vagaries of a mid-season schedule. All of those losses, save an OT setback to the Kings, were in conference. Worse, their home record in this downturn was an unacceptable 1-4-3. If their winning stint before the Anaheim game were maintained, the race was on.
Despite this recent sudden upswing, their losses are the wrong kind: twice to the Blue Jackets including one in regulation, alongside a bad regulation home setback to the Rangers and a non-conference home zonking to Utah.
One week after Old Time Hockey returned to South Philly, the BJ’s pulled the rip cord on head coach Dean Evason and installed eternal coaching veteran Rick "just-a-phone-call-away" Bowness. Since then, Columbus’ cannonaders have put together a mind-boggling 19-4-4 mark, playing to a 9-3-4 record since the Olympics.
In that same interval, among the clubs above the Flyers on the playoff depth chart: Pittsburgh has racked up a 7-5-4 mark, the Islanders have gone 9-6-0, Detroit has kept its head above water despite going 6-6-2, while Ottawa is still nipping at everyone’s heels on the wings of a 10-2-3 surge.
After Tuesday’s largely listless 3-2 regulation setback to Bowness’ boys, Flyers bleep-disturber extraordinaire Travis Konecny caught seven kinds of Hell from hockey twitter by making public a very understandable but honest sentiment in a pool interview:
"I mean, it's not like we were gonna win out the rest of the year. We lost one game against an opponent that was above us. It's frustrating. But it is what it is, and you just regroup," he said, apparently while still fully clothed at his locker.
Snippets like this are a great Rohrschach test for the perpetually suffering – either Konecny recognizes the mental requirement of athletes in pressure situations to push a losing game out of one’s mind and concentrate on the next one, or he’s a bum who has a quitter’s mentality, a loser’s mindset and that’s why this team will never win anything ever. What did the Flyers do to improve their standing in this playoff chase? Addition by subtraction. Nonetheless, even a month-long climb due to improved 5-on-5 play and consistent goaltending didn’t fix the long-term drags: purposeful lack of shot generation, not enough shots, not enough goals (despite the win, Thursday’s outburst was their most regulation scores since a 7-spot in Denver on Jan. 23) and a continually dismal power play which sits at 4-for-46 in 15 games after another oh-fer. Among their 11 remaining contests, “Three games vs. Detroit” now has such an ominous ring. Losses in all three can put any postseason talk permanently on ice. Points in any will draw the club tantalizingly closer but still out of reach. Frankly, so does “one game remaining against the Islanders, Capitals, Hurricanes, Devils, Bruins and Canadiens.”
The Flyers have seen their momentum swung back and forth for most of the schedule, a fact Tocchet finally pointed out publicly after Thursday's easy win. “Well, we lost the last game and (tonight) we responded, he said. “You can’t roll the rollercoaster, we’re trying to be even keeled. Great win, we should feel good about each other but tomorrow’s a different day.
“We gotta lock it in. It’s maturity,” Tocchet continued. “Hopefully we can string another two, three four … I haven’t seen the scoreboard so hopefully we got some help.”
Let’s recap: you’re not OK with Konecny observing this fact in a loss, but OK when the head coach brings it up after a win. Got it. This kind of lingering fan angst would make even Michael Corleone have a nervous breakdown after being pulled back in three too many times.
That midseason slump pretty much indicates the Flyers absolutely must maintain this current spree down the stretch, at minimum winning 8 more games regulation or beyond, without any other teams “helping,” or they have no shot to be close. They will lose games they should win, win games they should lose, but the ratio for this planned unpredictability should be roughly 1-to-4.
Perhaps the only game the club can afford to lose is their penultimate out-of-conference matchup at home against Dallas tomorrow night, since they’re good. Winnipeg (Apr. 11) conversely, is not and two points are a must. At a minimum, their home record needs to be dramatically improved: only 3-3-1 so far. The only acceptable regulation home defeat from here on out among the five left might be to the Stars.
“My big thing is, did we learn last month: how do you play tired, how do you stay focused, how do you keep leads, things like that where we haven’t been as great these last 5-6 weeks but we’re gonna get a dose of it now,” Tocchet said prior to that stretch-drive-opening 3-1 loss at Washington on Feb. 25.
It appears, yes, they did learn their lessons. You can argue with some of the processes outlines above but the results being overall positive at a time when it's required is encouraging.
Problem is, when not-ready-for-primetime players first encountered that dose of prime time, the grind from learning and failing is the very thing which prevented the goal from being reached.
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