Flyers flop in Game 3 blowout loss at home to Pens
Crosby nets four points as the Penguins take Game 3 in Philly
Pittsburgh’s Sidney Crosby, right, positions himself in front of Flyers’ goalie Brian Elliott, left, and Ivan Provorov during the second period of Game 3 Sunday in Philadelphia. Crosby tallied four points to lift the Penguins to a win.
PHILADELPHIA » Three games into their first-round playoff series, the Flyers have displayed at least one back-door charm. Brian Elliott, they have found, can recover from a disappointing performance. That’s it. Just that. After their 5-1 loss Sunday to the Pittsburgh Penguins, in which Elliott tied a Stanley Cup playoffs record of allowing two goals within five seconds, it was at least something for the Flyers to consider. They would know that their goaltender needed to be yanked early in a 7-0 Game 1 loss, but that he rallied to help produce a 5-1 Game 2 victory.
Game 4 is Wednesday. Encore?
“I don’t know,” Elliott was saying after the Flyers tripped into a 2-1 series hole. “If we had that answer, we probably wouldn’t be answering this question. You try your best to do it and we didn’t get it done.”
Elliott, troubled by injury late in the season, was ordinary Sunday, seeing 26 shots and repelling 21. And since he was hardly the only Flyer to supply mediocrity, he was not universally blamed.
Then again, since that wasn’t his head he was standing on, either, he would have to cop to at least some frustration.
“I’m sure just as much as any other guy in this room,” he said. “I think we know that’s not how to carry over what we did last game. We have to get back to what made us so good in the last game. And we have a couple of days here to refocus and look at things. We’ll have a game plan for sure.”
Since Dave Hakstol didn’t pull Elliott Sunday, and since the Pittsburgh scoring was more opportunity-based than goaltender-caused, that plan for Game 4 is not likely to include a change in net. There will be, though, that five-second, second-period jolt Sunday that allowed a 2-1 game become a 4-1 problem and thrust Elliott into hockeyplayoff history.
At 6:48 of the second, Evgeni Malkin scored on a 4-on-3 power-play to make it 3-1. Before the crowd of 19,955 had stopped complaining, Sidney Crosby would take the ensuing faceoff and find Brian Dumoulin, who would breeze in on Elliott and score from a fouron-four opportunity. Had Dumoulin taken four seconds, not five, it would have broken the record. He settled for breaking the game open at 6:53.
“I mean, I didn’t know,” Dumoulin said. “I think he (Crosby) just saw that and made a read. Obviously on 4-on-4, there is a little more ice there especially in the center-dot face-off. He just made a reat play off that face-off and made a great pass over to me in the zone.”
By then, the Flyers seemed numbed. They had been blasted in Game 1, recovered in Game 2, and had no answers in Game 3. Though Elliott wasn’t exactly pushed to offer an apology, he wasn’t quick, either, to volunteer one. Rather, he comfortably took his place beneath the many layers of Flyers’ failure, including a series of penalties involving stick violations, too many men on the ice and other un-forced blunders.
“I don’t know if it’s frustration or if you get caught not moving your feet and you’re reaching a little bit,” the goaltender said. “That’s what happens you lose control of your stick. That’s when the penalties are called. It’s definitely not an excuse. We did it to ourselves. We have to make it a focus. We can’t be doing that.”
Elliott wasn’t even prepared to offer the standard need-to-do-a-better-job routine when the postgame talk turned to the five-second flurry.
“We can’t get beat off of a neutral zone draw like that and have a guy walking down Main Street,” he said. “It’s just another thing that I don’t think we were ready for right off the draw there.”
Nor was he ready to stop the puck. But there’s always Game 4.
“It’s another loss,” said Elliott, who has allowed 11 goals in his three starts. “That’s all we think about right now. We have to come back in Game 4 here and use our crowd, use what we do best in this barn to make us successful.”
He’s done it once in the series. The Flyers, who have little alternative, will take that and hope.