An unexpected comeback sparked by money players
PHILADELPHIA >> The Comeback, drawn from the concept of so many years of slow starts and disappointing finishes, seemed wholly unexpected and every bit out of character.
Too many penalties early, too much of a return to last year’s level of goaltending by Brian Elliott, too many typically good plays by a hot Columbus Blue Jackets team that has stung the Flyers so often over the years.
Except this time it all wouldn’t prove to be a gamebreaker.
If they keep playing the way they played until the very end of a 7-4 victory Saturday night, the Flyers just might not have such a bad start to the season after all. That’s new, just like a few other things.
As Claude Giroux crooned at the end of a rather puzzling interview afterward, “As my friend Tom (Cochrane) says, ‘Life is a highway.’”
So the Flyers are finally learning to ride it all night long?
“Hard to say,” James van Riemsdyk said after scoring two goals to lead the comeback charge. “Since I’ve been here the last two years we’ve always shown we have that firepower and are capable of coming back. But I think last year we probably had to chase too many games. That’s tough.
“We were chasing the game, chasing the lead; we were down so early so often last year. This year it hasn’t felt like we’ve been in those situations where we’re down a bunch of goals and trying to climb our way back into it as much. Our process has been better as far as staying in games longer.”
Just for perspective: The consistently slow-starting Flyers of 2018-19 continued a years-long Flyers trend by falling behind early. Only they heightened their special gift of falling behind to levels never before seen.
Over the course of the season, they fell behind by
2-0 scores 32 times. They wound up winning only four of those games.
On this night against the Blue Jackets, who hadn’t had a regulation loss in their previous six games, the Flyers would draw first blood on a Jake Voracek goal. But they were down a goal by early in the second period, and by the time Josh Anderson scored his first goal of the season for Columbus 2:15 into the third, the Flyers were down 4-2 and seemingly ready to pack it in.
Or is that now just the way things used to be?
“I think we deserved to win this game,” new head coach Alain Vigneault said. “We were the better team. We had a real strong second period, tightened it up, gave up that third goal. We gave up an early goal in the third and our guys just kept playing and kept battling. Basically after two periods, that’s what we said, that we were going to find a way to win this game and that’s what we did.”
Part of the reason is the two-pronged commitment the Flyers made recently in free agency. JVR was brought in (or brought back) by former general manager Ron Hextall on the annual UFA day of
2018.
Kevin Hayes was brought in by GM successor Chuck Fletcher exactly a year later. Both about $7 million per year player, both with past labels that proclaimed them to be scoring stars of limited worth. Neither one were particularly productive in the first several games this season, either.
But van Riemsdyk, who had a terribly slow start in his first season back with the Flyers but nonetheless finished it with 27 goals, has scored three times over his last two games, and Hayes has scored in three straight to produce the burning question, does it feel good to prove his worth to the home fans?
“It’s easy to say that when you score in three in a row,” Hayes said. “But honestly, some of the guys that weren’t scoring here early on, I think are playing their best hockey. We’re getting our chances. JVR was playing lights out and he had no goals for the first seven or eight (games); and he’s been unreal. It’s hockey, it’s tough. It’s hard to score. If it was easy we’d all have 80 goals a year. It’s fun to score goals.”
It should be fun for guys like Canadian rock music (well, sort of) fan Giroux, Sean Couturier and Voracek to see the slow season starts that have plagued their team dating to 2011 perhaps turning into a more consistent brand of hockey.
And the occasional impressive comeback is a nice reward, too.
Shayne Gostisbehere, another non-producer over the first several games, got the comeback rolling with a rocket of a goal at 10:52 of the third to cut the Columbus lead to one. Then van Riemsdyk did his second tip-in act of the night, scoring this time off an Ivan Provorov shot to tie the game at 12:37. But at that point, Couturier took a penalty, and you might wonder if a comeback was going to fizzle just like the old days of ... 2018 or so.
That’s about when Hayes stepped in front of a pass across by Cam Atkinson and bolted back up the ice, first fending off chasing Blue Jackets then fooling goalie Joonas Korpisalo and scoring the game-winning goal.
The Flyers would promptly score twice more to make sure.
“The biggest thing was how we responded, going down two goals in the third,” Gostisbehere said. “Maybe some past games, we would have folded and gave that one away. I think it was a big character win.”
That, too, is something that’s a little different so far this new and different season.