Feeble Flyers need to have a Hart
What do you do with a goalie like Carter Hart?
Do you let him play through it? Do you bench him? Send him on a two-week tour of practice rinks from Voorhees to the Lehigh Valley while forever Phantom Felix Sandstrom finally gets a real chance in the big-league crease?
What’s a team of Flyers head coach Alain Vigneault, his top assistant coaches, his goalie instructor and two oncall sports psychologists going to do with their top crease client?
And while they’re at it, the Flyers might be wondering whether Hart’s teammates can offer a helping hand ... or at least lift an occasional finger along the way.
The 22-year-old goalie, unavailable on a Zoom chat Thursday night after an 8-3 defeat at the hands of the New York Rangers, isn’t working himself out of his extended slump. To wonder why is to not look at the last several games, although to be honest, what Flyers follower would want to look at them?
“We’re going to get an opportunity tomorrow to have our first practice in 12 days,” Vigneault deflected when asked if it was time to sit Hart, “and we’re going to get back to work. Both Brian (Elliott) and Carter are going to do like the rest of our team. We’re going to work our way through this.”
First work your way through the numerical facts: In the month of March, the Flyers have gone 4-9-1 and allowed 65 goals, an average of 4.64 per game, including 17 in two meetings with the Rangers.
For a while they were at least hanging in offensively, but over the last six games, the Flyers have scored 12 times, averaging two per ... and that’s with the other team usually up by a ton on the scoreboard and not exactly digging in defensively.
In their latest ignominy, not coincidentally coming against the New York Rangers, the
Flyers allowed six goals on the Rangers’ first 14 shots. Five of them were against Hart ... and although you’d expect a former top goalie prospect with a fine resume coming into the season to offer a big stop or two early in a game, Hart did not do that yet again. But you could replay those first six goals and realize that Hart didn’t have much of a chance to stop most of them, either.
For starters, Artemi Panarin was allowed by “defender” Nolan Patrick to hold the puck in a near circle. Taking his time, he flipped a pass over Ivan Provorov’s stick, past the puzzled Jake Voracek and right onto the stick blade of Dylan Strome, who easily jammed it past Hart 8:01 into the game.
Then Flyers defenseman Justin Braun turned a puck over at the blue line, the Rangers going the other way past the apparently surprised Patrick into a 2-on-1, with Pavel Buchnevich shooting it past the confidence-free Hart for 2-0. There followed a Rangers power play, and Mika Zibanejad tipped home a point shot that again flew through a Flyers crowd unimpeded.
All of 54 seconds into the second, and Braun looking absolutely lost, Zibanejad one-timed a pass for a 4-0 lead. Then at the 2:06 mark, it was Zibanejad again, scoring his 10th of the season and sixth in the last two games between the teams, for a 5-0 Rangers lead. This time it was a bullet from the top of the slot on a Ranger power play for Zibanejad’s second natural hat trick in the space of 10 days.
Then on yet another power play, a flip shot by K’Andre Miller went toward Shayne Gostisbehere, who tried to play matador with his glove hand and wound up helping the puck past new goalie Brian
Elliott.
The Flyers would score the last two goals of that period, as if it mattered. Later, Zibanejad assisted on a seventh Rangers goal, which gives him backto-back six-point games against the same team ... tying an old NHL mark that had the names Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux on it.
Imagine what either of those two would have done against this Flyers defense.
What really matters is what this last awful month of Flyers hockey has done to Hart.
“It’s not just one guy, it’s on our team,” Elliott said, “We have to be better. It’s a tough time right now but you can’t let that over-take your head. You have to approach each day like a new day.”
That’s easier said than done, of course, especially for a young goalie on the edge like Hart. It might be better for him to accept a long break to reset, rather than the usual “play through it” directive. The problem is that this ridiculously packed schedule doesn’t allow any such luxuries. So “work through it” it must be ... though it remains to be seen how that further impacts what whatever is left of Hart’s confidence.
Of course, he’s not alone.
“It’s not like we’re losing games by a goal, right now this team has really lost its identity from where we were to where we are right now,” Gostisbehere said. “It sucks right now. We’re too good a team to let it all just be squandered away. Just unacceptable.
“We keep saying in the room, when they score a goal don’t get down on ourselves, but it keeps happening . ... We have to handle some adversity and show what this team is made of in the next couple of weeks.”