Lindblom helps teammates avert another disaster

The day after the Flyers suffered the second-worst loss in their history, coach Alain Vigneault wanted to see which players were all-in.

Vigneault stopped counting after the second period of a stunning 4-3 win over the New York Islanders, the only team in the league that hadn’t lost a home game entering the opening puck drop.

Oskar Lindblom scored two goals, including the game-winner with 2:22 to go at Nassau Coliseum, where Commissioner Gary Bettman was in attendance.

Hard to believe the Flyers could give up a 3-0 lead in less than seven minutes, but they did partly because Carter Hart had a couple of lapses.

But Lindblom bailed them out after getting Wednesday off. The rest did wonders for the young man coming off successful cancer treatment, and totally unaccustomed to so many back-tobacks to accommodate COVID outbreaks.

“He was great,” captain Claude Giroux said of Lindblom. “I mean, he’s a pretty smart player. When you have a player who’s always in good position it makes your job a lot easier. He helped our team a lot tonight.”

Giroux redirected a goal into the net and added an assist for the Flyers (15-10-3-33), who at least temporarily moved within one point of the Boston Bruins and the fourth and final playoff berth in the East.

That’s only part of the story as Vigneault credited Giroux and his assistant captains with getting the Flyers squared away to play their game after getting blasted, 9-0, the previous night by the New York Rangers.

“They’re competitors,” Vigneault said. “We laid it all out tonight. We battled hard against a team that hadn’t to my recollection lost at home in quite some time. They were on a roll and we came in here on back-to-back nights and found a way to get it done even though we let that three-goal lead slip away. G’s line came back out and gave us a big goal at the end.”

Lindblom said the rest was Vigneault’s idea, not his and that he wanted to be with his teammates.

“Today I felt good, and I thought our line and our whole team played good,” said Lindblom, who notched his first goals since the series to open the season. “I want to play every game but sometimes I can’t. I played great today but there’s going to be a lot of games coming up here so I have to keep doing that. It can’t be just one game.”

Hart was outstanding in the