Flyers finding ways to give themselves a shot
PHILADELPHIA >> A redirection and a power-play score, a hard charge to the net and a broken play, a shorthanded twoon-one goal and a deposit into an empty net. That’s what it took for the Flyers Saturday to score enough to outlast the Colorado Avalanche.
That’s what it will take, too, for Alain Vigneault to be proven right.
“I’ve said from Day 1,” the Flyers’ coach was saying Saturday, before a 6-3 victory, “this will be a playoff team.”
He said it in training camp, and he meant it in Game 52. So he is seeing something, maybe in the way his players prepare, or carry themselves, or believe. But he’s not seeing shooters. No, he’s not seeing those.
As they arrived at the Wells Fargo Center Saturday, the Flyers were 16th in the NHL in shooting percentage, at 9.7 percent. Their most accurate shooter, among regulars, was Scott Laughton, at 16.3 percent, good only for 74th in the NHL.
The question is: Will it matter?
There is more than one way to win a hockey game, as the Flyers showed Saturday, with Sean Couturier continuously creating scoring opportunities, Joel Farabee and ever-active Kevin Hayes scoring twice and goalie Alex Lyon giving a major-league performance in goal. But how many ways are there to win championships without a player likely to win a game and a highlight clip in the same play?
By winning Saturday, a night after earning a point in an overtime loss in Pittsburgh, the Flyers had a share of fourth place in the Metropolitan Division. To Vigneault, that’s what matters in the first week of February. Or maybe he just knows it’s all he can control.
“You know, right now my focus is on trying to win the game in front of us,” he said. “Obviously, if we could score a little bit more in certain situations it would be beneficial.”
Rudimentary as that analysis was, Vigneault was not being dismissive. He knows the Flyers are taking shots that are either being easily smothered or arriving from low-percentage angles. There’s also the third possibility, which is that he is stuck with a team full of inaccurate shooters. If so, then the Flyers have two choices. One is to add a shooter by the Feb. 24 trade deadline. The other is to keep believing that poor shooters suddenly will commence to finding slivers of open net.
It’s pretty much what Hayes did in the first period Saturday, when he scored on the power play on a good feed from James van Riemsdyk via Travis Konecny.
“It was kind of a broken play,” Hayes said. “I thought they were going to ice it and T.K. stopped it, passed it to JVR. And then I just redirected it.”
That works. But for how long?
“I think our guys are getting some good looks,” Vigneault said. “And if we stay with the right process, we will be able to capitalize a little bit more.”
In Pittsburgh, the Flyers trusted that process and out-shot the Penguins, 174, in the third period but could not shove the gamewinning goal past Tristan Jarry before Sidney Crosby cost them a point in overtime.
“We’re good,” Vigneault said. “That’s a good team, Pittsburgh. We had quite a few good looks. I thought we should have won and didn’t. We got a point. We played well there. When it was time to defend, we defended well. And when it was time to go on the attack, we went on the attack and attacked well.”
Entering the game Saturday, the Flyers’ leading goal scorer was Konecny, with 17. That ranked 52nd in the NHL. Games, and championships, can be won with balanced rosters lacking a dynamic, highscoring player. The New Jersey Devils won the Stanley Cup in 1995 and 2000, and neither time had a goal-scorer in the top 50 in the NHL. Of course, they had Scott Stevens on defense and Martin Brodeur in net. The Flyers have respectable goaltending, but Carter Hart’s .905 saves percentage ranked 43rd in the NHL, while Brian Elliott checked in only at No. 52 with his .901 effort.
Not every team is constructed to win 10-9 games. The Flyers, with modest speed, are not one of those teams. That explains why they entered the game ranked 16th in the NHL in scoring. They are, however, a responsible 28-17-7, largely because they were ranked 11th in goals-allowed.
“If we keep going like this,” Farabee said, “we’re going to be happy at the end.”
There is nothing wrong with being good at a typically slower pace. But in the playoffs, everything tightens. That’s when the teams that either have Brodeur-level goalkeeping or shooters with breathtaking accuracy become more likely to break from that pack.
Against Colorado, van Riemsdyk, who is paid to score, failed to capitalize on a very open net and extend a 3-2 lead midway through the second period. After shooting a careerhigh 16.2 percent last season, van Riemsdyk is lingering at 11.3 percent this season. He did, however, assist on Hayes’ first-period power play goal.
“Well, our unit had a sloppy, whole, power play pretty much,” van Riemsdyk said. “We were just chasing it around, not making good plays and then we finally won some battles there at the end. We were able to string together two passes.”
It’s one way to play winning hockey. For the Flyers, at least until the trade deadline, that will have to be enough.
To contact Jack McCaffery, email him at jmccaffery@21stcenturymedia.com; follow him on Twitter @JackMcCaffery