Disappointing Game 7 loss leaves Flyers with major questions

Long after being the hottest team in the NHL and resembling a Stanley Cup contender in February and March, Philadelphia won its first four games when hockey resumed as if it hadn’t missed a beat.

The Flyers earned the top seed in the Eastern Conference and made it through a tough first-round opponent in Montreal. Then the power went out of the power play, a goal against in Game 7 sank their morale and they were eliminated in the second round by the New York Islanders, leaving more questions than answers about a season that showed promise months and even weeks ago.

“We were playing great hockey there at the start,” goaltender Carter Hart said.

“We came in the bubble hot. Playoff hockey is a different animal. You got to bring it every night. You can’t have off nights. Bounces just didn’t go our way.”

Philadelphia won its first playoff series since 2012 and came back from a 3-1 deficit against New York to force a seventh game. All that despite scoring just four power-play goals in 52 chances in the postseason and going 0 for 13 in the Islanders series.

Center Sean Couturier, who sprained the medial collateral ligament in his right knee in a collision with Mathew Barzal in Game 5, missed Game 6 and played through it in Game 7, said if the Flyers knew what was wrong with the power play, they could’ve fixed it.

On the surface, the power outage was stunning for a team with Couturier, Claude Giroux, Jakub Voracek, Travis Konecny and Ivan Provorov usually able to fill the net.

“Our power play wasn’t there this series,” Giroux said. “Could have gotten us a couple big goals this series, but power play didn’t get the job done.”

Couturier injured the same knee he played on injured in the playoffs two years ago, and it’s unclear how many other players weren’t fully healthy.

The Flyers did get an emotional boost when Oskar Lindblom returned to the lineup for Game 6, just two months after completing treatments for a rare form of bone cancer, but they weren’t able to play long enough for him to help try to end the franchise’s title drought that dates to 1975.