Hextall doesn’t look ready to ax Hak

PHILADELPHIA » Shortly after a variety of calls were made in a half-empty building by furious Flyers fans seeking his head, or at least his title, still-head coach Dave Hakstol decided the time was right to pay them all a collective compliment.

“Hey, nobody said this was going to be easy,” Hakstol said after his dreadful hockey team lost 3-1 Tuesday night to the San Jose Sharks. “If you don’t want to be in this spot, that’s a choice.”

Hakstol, like at least several other (along with at least a couple of GMs) head coaches before him during the 40-plus-year Cupless streak in Philadelphia, was blasted about the ears by fans shouting for his removal. His choice was to ignore the noise and focus on the silent disaster playing out before his eyes.

“That’s how I react to it,” he said. “There’s high expectations in this market. We’ve got maybe the best fans in the National Hockey League, and you know what, they’re full value for having expectations.”

Because he’d experienced such expectations as a player in this very place, general manager Ron Hextall decided the time was right to vent a few of his feelings about an odd losing streak that reached nine with this laugher (04-5), which had to rank and reek right up there with one of the worst Flyers losses in recent memory.

San Jose is not a team that expects to blow others out, but it is an opportunistic club that jumped on an array of Flyers mistakes. They ignored Claude Giroux’s goal 48 seconds into the game, and smoothly cruised to a 3-1 lead after two periods. That’s when the die was cast and the agony of the third period would settle in on the poor souls in the stands.

They watched as the Flyers skated slowly for 17 minutes of that third period, managing to get only one shot during that entire time on Sharks goalie Aaron Dell. He woke up when the Flyers finally got across center ice and jammed a puck or two his way with about three minutes left, then perhaps broke a slight sweat sometime during the last 2:46 of empty-net time with an extra Flyers skater.

But everyone knew it would be all be part of a ninth straight loss. Even the strangely optimistic boss, who said he still believes “we’re a playoff team.”

“I’m pretty good with the way our team’s played,” Hextall said. “I think tonight we ran a little bit out of energy. Obviously the results lately are not very good. We deserve better but we haven’t gotten better.

“If we were playing poorly, I would be the first to say we’re playing poorly. We are not playing poorly. To look objectively at our team right now, to say we are playing poorly right now, no. Are we shooting ourselves in the foot at times? Yes, we are. Critical mistakes at critical times, yes. Kind of what happens when the snowball starts to go the wrong way.”

OK, so commence shoveling. Even if the boss was already in full dig.

But Hextall is not excavating a six-foot hole for his head coach. Not yet, anyway, even if the next game Saturday is against the Boston Bruins, who will aim to give the Flyers what would be their longest streak of winless hockey since 2008 (an 0-8-2 run).