Road trip highlighted Flyers’ case of nerves at home

PHILADELPHIA » The Flyers’ return to game action at Wells Fargo Center Tuesday night came with some semblance of trepidation. Or at least it was made to sound that way by some players who should be welcoming the five-game homestand that began on this night with a game against the Toronto Maple Leafs, rather than fearing it.

Asked earlier Tuesday if playing in front of the home fans can tend to knock a player off his game, Flyers captain Claude Giroux said, “Yeah, of course.

“That’s one of the situations we had when we were losing 10 in a row,” Giroux said. “We started wanting to do too much, and try to be the person to make a difference in the game instead of just simplifying it and playing the team system.”

Of course, fans paying high ticket prices tend to express their dismay when their team does things like lose 10 games in a row. The Flyers seemed to fall prey to just that kind of atmospheric condition — playing poorly while fans either booed or chanted for the head coach’s head — before escaping last week to a three-game road trip in western Canada that began in Calgary.

Hockey being the weird game it is ... the Flyers promptly won all three on that trip.

“It was just getting over the hump,” whatme-worry? head coach Dave Hakstol said. “We needed to get that one win. The last couple of games toward the end of (the losing streak), when we couldn’t find a way to win, you could start to see guys squeezing (sticks) a little bit and that’s natural. That happens mentally. But we had a nice little break getting out to Calgary early and that gave us a chance to clear our minds a little bit.

“Like I said, it’s a bunch of little things. You get one win and all of a sudden you start to rebuild a little bit of that swagger, and you have to have that to win games.”

Human nature, Giroux and others stressed, can do that to a player in times of, well, stress. But road trips can sometimes calm the nerves.

“From top to bottom, I think we all did a good job in not pushing any panic buttons and having faith in what we were doing,” goalie Brian Elliott said of the mood during the road trip. “That steady belief is a calming factor for the entire group.”

Maybe ear plugs could help for the return trip, too.

“When the confidence is not there you start doubting your play and how you’re doing and doubting which play to make,” Giroux said. “Now we have a little bit more confidence; when everything goes well and you’re playing in your building the confidence can get real high. But when it’s not going the right way and the fans start giving it you, the confidence goes down. So we have to stay strong together and stick together out there.”

*** The Flyers could count themselves as fortunate, getting the gifted Maple Leafs on a night when they were missing top player Auston Matthews. The young center, who has 13 goals and 26 points in 26 games played, is out with a suspected concussion after colliding with teammate Morgan Rielly last Saturday during a game against Pittsburgh. Matthews also sat out a game against the Edmonton Oilers Sunday.

All that said, Leafs head coach Mike Babcock almost comically was sticking to the league-mandated “upper body injury” diagnosis. Sort of...

After Babcock said Matthews couldn’t play but was on the team’s road trip and was hopeful of a quick return, Babcock was asked if Matthews had been through the concussion protocol.

“I think he’s day to day, so I think he’s playing every day,” Babcock said. “Day to day is normally 10 days, but we’ll go day to day until he’s ready . ... I don’t excatly know what happened there but I didn’t know he had a concussion. I didn’t know.”

Recovery protocol for a Grade I concussion is usually 7-10 days in the NHL.

*** NOTES » Radko Gudas finally finished his latest suspension vacation, this one 10 days, and was in the starting lineup against the Leafs. Asked if it was an advantage to sit and watch games from an upper-level seat, Gudas said, “I don’t think it was an advantage. You can see, obviously, the game a little bit differently, but I’d rather be playing than watching.” ... An “ill” Jori Lehtera was, um, a healthy scratch Tuesday night.