Hart shivering on ice and off after Flyers’ loss
Goalie struggles outdoors in 7-3 loss to Bruins
This was not what Carter Hart had in mind for his first NHL outdoors game, but since he professes to not be a goalie prone to keeping his emotions buried inside, he’ll likely get over it quickly.
Or at least that’s what it seemed like Hart was saying after a 7-3 Boston Bruins win at Lake Tahoe.
Braving the freezing postgame conditions — at least it was cold enough then to freeze a hockey rink surface — Hart took two questions from the media on a Zoom call, but his equipment wasn’t standing up to the conditions. With no volume, and with him clearly suffering from the cold, only the people holding the cameras on the scene knew what he had to say.
But after allowing six goals on 29 Bruins shots over the first two periods, what more could Hart say Sunday night? He wasn’t good, his teammates weren’t either.
Underscoring all that, of course, was that the Flyers were missing six rather important starters. Then again, in five games this season against the Bruins, they have five losses (03-2). So you wonder if it mattered whether Claude Giroux, Jake Voracek, Travis Konecny, Scott Laughton, Oskar Lindblom and Justin Braun were there, or not.
At least they didn’t have to make a ridiculously long trip for this mess of a hockey outing that was ill-managed by the league and an unnecessary embarrassment for the Flyers.
This game was almost doomed from the start, as the other part of the weekend Lake Tahoe doubleheader, Vegas vs. Colorado, had to be played in two parts Saturday.
That’s because the ice was
melting in the daytime sun.
The Flyers probably wish that could have happened to them instead of seeing their game wilt under the Bruins’ waves of attack starting at sunset on Sunday.
But playing when they did was no picnic, either.
“Well, it wasn’t that bad,” Sean Couturier was heard to say afterward. “It wasn’t easy, obviously. The hardest part was the first period, with all the sun ... being blinded by the sun. It was kind of dangerous sometimes. But it was the same for both teams.”
The Bruins didn’t seem to mind, but then, as Couturier said a few times,
“they were the better team.”
They always are the better team when these two get together. That might of have been part of what Carter Hart had to say...
If anyone had heard him. He shivered in the cold for the third period as Brian Elliott mopped up a forgettable outing out west.
“We knew we needed our A game,” Couturier said. “We had a little letdown in the second period. We gave up four goals and it’s tough to win a game when you give up four goals in a period.
“You have to play a simple hockey game and I thought they did a better job of that than us.”