Couturier, Flyers hope home is sweeter
VOORHEES, N.J. » The Flyers should be commended for coming up with a solid Game 5 performance in Pittsburgh, enabling them to extend the series with the Penguins, bringing it home for Game 6 Sunday at Wells Fargo Center (3 p.m., NBC10).
Then again ... bringing it all back home can present problems.
For one, the Flyers have been lousy at home this playoff series, losing Games 3 and 4 to the cumulative tune of 10-1.
What’s more, the Flyers, whose home record (22-136) was barely better than their away record (20-13-8) during the season, are ohfor-4 in South Philly against the Penguins in 2017-18, outscored 20-4.
“I don’t know, we go on the road and play our game and play it hard,” Claude Giroux said by way of an explanation. “We’ve got to bring that game home tomorrow.”
That’s proven to be more difficult than it should be.
“I don’t really have an answer for you,” Giroux said. “We’re a pretty young team and sometimes the crowd, when it’s not going our way, they can get on us a little bit. When you’re a young team sometimes it’s a little tough. But we’ve got to put that behind us . ... We need to have a first period like we did in Game 3, and we can go on from there.”
Yes, that third series game was heavily slanted the home team’s way in the first period. The Flyers outshot the Penguins 11-4, but fell behind 1-0 because of a Sidney Crosby goal. The Penguins would build on their good first-period fortune and pull away to a 5-1 victory. That preceded a 5-0 win in Game 4 in a game Pittsburgh dominated.
Behind newly rebuilt (again) goaltender Michal Neuvirth and a heroic effort by the injured Sean Couturier, however, the Flyers fought back to take Game 5 Friday night and now have arrived home to try to change a trend: The Flyers’ 22 home victories were the fewest of any of the 16 playoff teams this spring.
“Just keep it simple, play our game, don’t get worried about putting on a show or worry about what the fans think,” Couturier said when asked for a home remedy. “Just do what we did last game. Stick together, stay disciplined — I think that’s going to be a huge part of tomorrow’s game.”
With pain from the leg injury he’d incurred in practice before Game 4 still very evident, Couturier put in a limited amount of ice time while working as a third-line center Friday. Yet he was the guy scoring the gamewinning goal with 1:15 left in regulation.
An other-worldly glove stop by Neuvirth on Crosby preserved the victory 25 seconds later, with Matt Read sewing it up with an empty-net goal.
Oh, and as for that Neuvirth stop...
“I think it looked prettier than it was, to be honest,” Crosby said Saturday. “He made a good read to get over there. Obviously, you’d like to have those opportunities. But he made a good save. You have to give him credit.”
Overall, it was a credible Flyers performance, but as coach Dave Hakstol said, “I think we can all raise the level a little bit, and honestly, we’re going to have to do that here tomorrow night to push it to a seventh game.”
They’re also going to have to play a home game the way they’ve played two tough road games in this series. Even Penguins fans would have admitted before the series that if their team lost twice at home in the first five games of the series, they’d be in trouble.
As it is, the Penguins are still sitting pretty heading for Game 6.
“You have to have that urgency, that desperation level, and maybe you find that’s easier to kind of get to if you’re on the road a little more,” Crosby said. “It doesn’t change anything, but I think that urgency still has to be there.”