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-to-backs 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
first two periods before turning into a revolving door. He surrendered three goals in a span of 6:30. Hart gave Michael Dal Colle too much of the far side of the net. Then Hart allowed Sebastian Aho the short side of the goal. When Oliver Wahlstrom tallied at 14:27, the puck deflecting off Travis Sandheim’s stick, the Flyers were in big trouble.
But after Lindblom bailed the Flyers out, Hart hung in for the frantic final two minutes, much of it with his team skating five against six.
“I definitely need to make some more saves in the third period, so they don’t come back in the game,” said Hart, who stopped 22 shots. “But at the end of the day we got the two points and it’s something to keep building off of. … I’m just chipping away at things now. It’s going in the right direction. I’ve just got to build off of it.”
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Among other line changes Thursday, the Flyers teamed Kevin Hayes, Scott Laughton and Jake Voracek, who tallied their third goal.
Additionally, Vigneault sent a message after the debacle with the Rangers, benching Michael Raffl, Connor Bunnaman and Andy Andreoff for a line of Casen Twarynski, Oskar Lindblom and Nicolas Aube-Kubel.
Vigneault isn’t OK with his top lines, either, accusing them of inconsistency.
“Some of our players are going from a grade A performance to a C performance,” Vigneault said. “In this league, that’s just not good enough. You can’t always be at your top. But you can’t have the drop-offs that we’re having as a team right now.’’
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The Flyers will be without the services of defenseman Robert Hagg for at least two weeks, and possibly a month after he banged up his shoulder against the Rangers.
“They’re looking at two to four weeks,” Vigneault said pre-game during a videoconference Thursday. “That’s the first update that we have. He’s with us on the trip. We get a chance when we get back home (Sunday) to have our doctors look at him.’’
Nate Prosser, fresh up from the taxi squad, replaced Hagg. Defenseman Shayne Gostisbehere remains in Vigneault’s doghouse, having underperformed recently.
Gostisbehere has been caught flatfooted after a solid start to his season. •••
Mika Zibanejad tied the NHL record for most points in a period in the Rangers win over the Flyers Wednesday.
Zibanejad scored three goals and three assists for six points. The only other NHL player to do that is Islanders forward Bryan Trottier, who went 3-3—6 in the second period against the Rangers on Dec. 23, 1978.