With a trap set, a championship-level response
PHILADELPHIA » There will be the drawn-out journeys to the West Coast and the wintertime marches into the frozen gut of Canada. There will be the overnight flights and the hassles of travel to New York. There will be the temptations during those visits to Florida. There will be the expectation of playing in various time zones. For the Flyers this season, there was even a game in Prague.
There will be all of that. Then, there will be the hidden challenges, the games that don’t leap from the schedule when it is released in the summer but which will, season after NHL season, mean everything.
The Flyers had one Thursday.
They passed. Impressively.
“We’re going to have a real tough game tonight,” Alain Vigneault said before a 4-1 victory over Carolina. “No doubt.”
The Hurricanes would be in, rested for their first game in five days and just a slot behind the Islanders for the final Eastern Conference playoff spot. As for the Flyers, they would have played the night before, winning in Washington to continue a charge toward the top of the Metropolitan Division.
Not that it was so late in the regular season that there still wouldn’t be plentiful standings ripples, but it was March, there were only 16 games left, and the room for letdowns had been reduced to the point of discomfort.
Those are the games the very good teams win.
“Good job by our guys,” Scott Laughton decided, “not to have a letdown.”
The Flyers haven’t had a letdown since their Feb. 15 loss in Tampa, and the elements of their victory Thursday proved why. Even though it was the Hurricanes who were resting comfortably in Philadelphia as the Flyers wrestled with the Caps, Vigneault’s team was able to play its most explosive hockey at the two points in the game where it most mattered.
The Flyers showed immediate jump, taking a first-period lead on an extra-effort goal from Ivan Provorov. Then, after Carolina drew within 2-1 at 2:55 of the third, the Flyers showed a championship-level defiance, scoring twice in the next 1:59, inspiring their excited, Fan Appreciation Night crowd to commence with the smart-phone-watching. As it would happen, the Rangers would defeat the Capitals in overtime. That would give the Flyers and Caps 87 points apiece with 15 games to play.
“That was definitely the response we were looking for as a group,” Vigneault said. “Talk about building. Talk about growing. That’s the response we needed right there.”
As has been the case during his blossoming Coach of the Year candidacy, Vigneault made the right moves, expertly calculating that the game would be won by the lower lines. It’s why he started Nate Thompson with Nicolas Aube-Kubel and Michael Raffl, then watched his bottom six produce two goals. That included Raffl’s modified breakaway on a feed from Tyler Pitlick, good for a 2-0 lead at 9:34 of the second.
“Sometimes it’s just easier to start coming off a back-toback,” Raffl said. “I think you are still in ‘game’ mode a little bit. I think we had a good start and followed it up in the second. They are an extremely dangerous team and Hartsy made a couple of really good saves.”
Carter Hart was what he needed to be in net, which was calm and alert. That, too, was from a wise Vigneault calculation to start Elliott in Washington and bring back his younger goalie in his Wells Fargo Center comfort zone.
“Last night in Washington was an emotional, physical, hard game, draining physically and also mentally,” Vigneault warned beforehand. “We don’t have a lot of time to regroup. This is a big game. They are going to be ready. They are going to be fighting for their playoff berth. So we’re going to need our best effort and our best game tonight.”
Whether it was their best game would be up to the style judges. As for the result, that would carry its own beauty. For on a night when the NHL had cleverly set a scheduling trap, the Flyers recovered from a massive victory and a late-night train ride home to run a winning streak to eight.
They were challenged. And they responded.
“After that first goal, we didn’t just sit back,” Provorov said. “We kept playing our game. And we kept our lead.”
With that, they had a share of first place with just over a month left before the playoffs. On a night when so much could have gone wrong, and which may have turned disastrous in recent years, the Flyers were close to being at their best.
“A lot of these guys want to prove that they can be successful,” Vigneault said. “And that’s what we’re all trying to do right now. Every one of us is pushing in the same direction.”
Before the game, Vigneault copped to, “being a pain in the butt sometimes.” But he knew what was available to the Flyers Thursday and reminded them of that in whatever tone he felt necessary.
“You know, at the end of the day, the credit really goes to the players,” he said. “It goes to them for understanding what it takes to go on the ice and then play the winning way and going out there and executing and doing it.”
There will be other challenges as the race for a division championship turns even nastier. There is still a trip to Tampa Bay that could sting, and a twogame pip of a swing through Dallas and Nashville. And the season will end with two of the final three games on the road. It’s the NHL. It’s how it works.
But on a night that had a chance to be sneaky tough, the Flyers won by three goals. It’s just what the contenders will do.