Slow starts again plague Flyers’
PHILADELPHIA >> Based on their nine not-so-lively games thus far, and on their similar self-confessions of recent seasons and the last couple of weeks ... the Flyers again played “Flyer Hockey” Monday night at Wells Fargo Center.
That would be: Start slow, fall behind, finally notice, try to come back, carry the momentum ... and fall short. This preordained script ended in a 4-1 loss to the Colorado Avalanche Monday night. It also brought about an avalanche of testimonials.
Even from young guys just getting used to the plot line.
“Yeah, I don’t know, I don’t think we were great,” second-year center Nolan Patrick said. “You see the way we play when we get down, we dominate the game. That’s something we need to do for a full 60 minutes. We can’t just wait until we’re down before we start making a push like that. We’re capable of so much more.”
“It took us getting down to kind of come to life there,” sophomore defenseman Travis Sanheim echoed. “In our own building we’ve got to come out strong. It’s just a mindset. Coming in, we have to be more mentally focused and ready to go when the puckdrop starts.”
The Flyers weren’t that at the opening puck drop Monday night. They certainly weren’t focused when Jordan Weal, who is mostly scoring minor penalties these days, went off for tripping just 2:08 into the game. A little over a minute later, Mikko Rantanen had a power play goal and another fruitless Flyers chase was on.
Head coach Dave Hakstol also reacted to Weal’s penalty: “I barked at the refs initially, because I thought it was a soft call. And then when I looked at it, it’s a penalty. That’s on us.”
It always seems to be on the Flyers to come back from early deficits. They have made up ground on occasion. This loss drops them only to 4-5, which isn’t all that bad considering they’ve allowed the other guys to score the first goal in eight out of their nine games.
Kind of a definition of a team that starts slow.
“That’s not how we want to come out,” putupon goalie Brian Elliott said. “It just seems to happen. We’ve got to get that turned around. We’re going to be talking about that, I think, in the coming days.”
Elliott can talk about how he hasn’t played all that badly, and yet the Flyers are dead last in the league in goalie save percentage (.862 coming in). That the conclusion would be that the defensemen are struggling mightily ... well, that ties right in with the slow start laments. Just in a different way. “We need to play the puck quicker down low,” second-year defender Robert Hagg said. “It seems like we’re holding onto it too much, then we have the forwards stretched out to the red line and we don’t have anything to play. So I think it really has to start back there and we have to move the puck quicker and get it up ice.
“We can’t be too fancy back there.”
All of this has been a bit too much for Hakstol. Nothing about this Flyers team has dogged him more than its propensity for slow starts. He doesn’t like seeing it happen again. Especially when there might be a little more heat on him now than anytime previous as a Flyers coach.
“We had a good start two games ago, today it wasn’t good enough,” Hakstol said. “We looked exactly like we didn’t practice yesterday. We were coming off a day when we were off the ice yesterday, we had a good morning skate this morning and had an opportunity to be crisp (tonight), and that didn’t carry over to our start and that’s not acceptable.”
Asked the obvious question of whether such behavior is characteristic – and has been for some time – of his team, Hakstol said sharply, “It has been too many days and too many games this year.”