Flyers’ fall not a byproduct of COVID call
Blaming this flopping Flyers season on COVID has only a shred of merit. There is no question the Flyers were at the top of the game before they got the test results after their
7-4 win over the Washington Capitals on Feb. 7.
The Flyers were 8-3-2 after that Capital triumph. Since the accompanying league-mandated 11-day shutdown, they’d won just 11 of 29 games before taking on the Pittsburgh Penguins Thursday.
Choosing his words carefully, Flyers coach Alain Vigneault theorized the sheer volume of games in this jam-packed NHL season caught up with his team. That is amazing, considering how the Flyers have one of the younger rosters in both the East Division and the league, and that players live to play games, not kill themselves practicing.
“It’s not that I don’t want to reflect on the past, we’ll be able to do that at some point,” Vigneault said Thursday. “But the COVID reality is that our schedule was condensed prior to that. It’s even more condensed now. That’s making it very challenging for everyone. The players that came back from COVID and the rest of our group that were stopped for, I think it was five or six days, and then one practice and back in.
“So, it’s been a challenge.” It’s hard to believe the Flyers have been unable to fight through the grind as a team despite the leadership of Claude Giroux, Sean Couturier and others, and keep pace with the rest of the East.
The average age of the Flyers is 27.6 years old per HockeyReference.com figures. They’re still the fourth-youngest team in the East where the divisionleading Washington Capitals have a roster with an average age of 30.4 years, the oldest average in the NHL.
The average age of the
New York Islanders is 29.1, the Boston Bruins 28.6, the Penguins 28.2, the Buffalo Sabres 27.3, the New Jersey Devils 26.2, the New York Rangers 25.8.
You would think younger legs would translate into fresher legs for the Flyers. Instead, they’re on the outside looking in entering the Penguins game, with just eight victories in 24 games since the beginning of March.
Individually, it’s impossible to spot any Flyer still fighting off the impact of COVID other than forward Oskar Lindblom, one of seven players to contract the virus. He unquestionably has had a rough bounce back, one compounded by the loss of the previous season while he battled cancer.
Forward Scott Laughton, who at Monday’s trade deadline signed a five-year contract extension, also had COVID. He’s been over it for a while and doesn’t think it’s been a factor. Ditto Giroux, who had a rough bout with COVID.
“We’re not going to use this as an excuse,” Giroux said. “It’s not like we’re the only team that got hit by it. It sucks that we did get hit but at the end of the day it’s a non-factor.”
Every team in the East has had a COVID outbreak with the exception of the Penguins. The Bruins and Devils had huge outbreaks. The Rangers, Islanders and Capitals also were slammed.
Caps veterans Evgeny Kuznetsov, Dmitry Orlov, Alex Ovechkin and
Ilya Samsonov all missed four games this season after gathering in the same hotel room, unbeknownst that Samsonov had been exposed to the virus. Now, that group is pretty much on cruise control as the Stanley Cup playoffs approach and the Flyers play out the string.
A few weeks before the trade deadline, one spent dumping some veteran talent, Flyers general manager Chuck Fletcher talked about the “massive mental and emotional challenge this year.” Challenge, sure. But massive? Only for the Flyers, who had won just two of their last eight games and face an offseason of change.
“There are certainly some players that are not at the level they need to be and are not in a good place in some different ways,” is the way Fletcher described the Flyers. “And there’s probably a little bit more to their play than what everybody realizes, and I think we’ve just got to be a little bit careful over-analyzing some of these young players that have shown to be good players in the past. My expectation is they’ll find that path again.”
Fletcher didn’t say where the guys would find that path.
The Caps coasted to a 6-1 win over the Flyers Tuesday, doing their jobs so efficiently it looked like the first team was scrimmaging the backups. It was the ultimate example of how to play pro hockey.
Giroux, asked where the Flyers are now, echoed chemistry.
“For us, it’s one game at a time,” Giroux said. “Get a few wins in a row, you never know, we can get back in the picture. Saying that, we need to play better, we need to play more as a team and just help each other out there. If we do that, we’re going to start winning hockey games here.”
Playing as a team, picking each other up, fundamental hockey – not COVID – is what the Flyers need to take from this season.
And you can point the finger at players and management.