Flyers play well, but fail to recall sneaky plan in 1-0 loss to Golden Knights
PHILADELPHIA >> Even when he was busy helping the Pittsburgh Penguins win three Stanley Cups, Marc-Andre Fleury rarely had an easy time with the Flyers.
That always inconsistent team from across the Commonwealth dominated his Penguins for a few seasons, then were dominated by Fleury’s team for a few seasons after that. But all along, the Flyers rarely stopped doing what they had done to him in order to try to gain an edge.
“Get in his kitchen?” Wayne Simmonds correctly guessed Saturday, after Fleury and his Vegas Golden Knights had survived a 1-0 tussle with the Flyers at Wells Fargo Center. “We just played the game we always play, trying to get bodies to the net. I didn’t really think about that I guess, we just tried to get to the net, get pucks to the net. Whatever it is, it is. Unfortunately, we didn’t score today.”
Through five games of their latest seasonal attempt to play past the Phillies’ opener, the Flyers have scored at a so-so 3-plus per game rate. That includes playing victim in Fleury’s 49th career shutout show, a game that was entertaining for two periods, but absent throughout of that old Philadelphia plan that had worked so occasionally well during Fleury’s Pittsburgh years. Bother him. Block his view. Accidentally bump him going by.
Put a sneaky stick to his shins.
If not flat-out run him (hey, it’s only October), at least act like you might, you know?
“When you score zero goals you’ve got to do more,” Scott Laughton said. “It just didn’t work out for us tonight. We’ll go back to the drawing board and get back at it.”
But Laughton, inexperienced as he is in the old plan against Fleury and other gifted goalies of his ilk, did seem to have at least a clue as to what the Flyers didn’t do.
“Get more traffic,” he said. “Getting in his eyes ... I’m not sure.”
Other than forgetting to go face-to-face with the guy long ago nicknamed “The Flower,” the Flyers (2-3) played very well on this day. Certainly way better than they had in their previous three games, during which they allowed 17 goals.
In net for the bulk of that sloppy, defensively culpable stretch was Brian Elliott, the starting goalie of a limping net corps that needs strong defensive play in front of it on a nightly basis, not just for the occasional home matinee.
The jury is still out on how well Elliott, like Fleury 33 years old but seemingly with a lot more miles on him, can respond to the offseason surgery he had. Yet Elliott was mostly rock solid Saturday, while noticing how different his teammates looked in front of him.
“I thought we did basically what you need to do to win a hockey game,” Elliott said. “We had great blocked shots; guys putting their body on the line. We had great battles in the corners, offensive and defensive zones. I thought it was a really good game. It’s tough that it came down to a last-minute breakdown to a goal.”
That came courtesy of the guy usually known as the Flyers’ most consistent defensive forward, No. 1 center Sean Couturier. With the clock ticking down in the waning minutes of regulation, Couturier tried to backhandshovel a clearing pass and it fell flat into a defensive zone turnover. Clearly taken by that failure, he looked around and somehow didn’t see Vegas’ Cody Eakins sneak in behind him. Eakins took a pass and had an easy time beating Elliott over the shoulder with 1:25 left for a 1-0 lead.
But that Couturier booboo would only hold up for the Golden Knights because the resurgent goalie that had led them to an unreal run to the Stanley Cup Finals in the franchise’s first season finally was playing like himself. Perhaps that had a lot to do with the Flyers letting him.
“It’s a fun place to play,” Fleury said of Philly. “It’s always loud and the atmosphere is good and people are on you a bit, so it’s a good place to play and I’ll always say you win as a team, you lose as a team. So it’s just a good team win tonight.”
Perhaps it wouldn’t have happened had the Flyers put more pressure on Fleury, something they didn’t have trouble doing on the season’s first night last week in Las Vegas, scoring five times against Fleury in the game’s first two periods en route to a 5-2 win.
“We can try to put more traffic and stuff there, but it’s not like we weren’t doing it,” Couturier said. “He was just on his game finding pucks. You try to make it hard on him, but he did a good job finding those pucks.”
While his early breakaway saves were impressive, Fleury saved his best for last, diving across the crease in the dying seconds while the Flyers were finally putting on a lot of heat with an extra skater. Claude Giroux found a puck and fired it toward an empty net, and the diving Fleury was able to glove the puck to preserve the victory.
But he had to make sure.
“I took a peek, I felt it,” Fleury said. “I just wanted to make sure, because we got a lot of shots.”
Maybe so, but before then, the Flyers hadn’t dished enough shots. Not with the puck or otherwise.