The Flyers lost bad to the Boston Bruins 5-2 in Philadelphia on Thursday.
Yeah, there wasn’t enough adult beverage in the frig to watch this game.
Sami Kapanen and Simon Gagne(power play) scored the only goals for the Flyers.
Bergeron, Green and Kapanen were the three stars. Michal Handzus was the lone plus Flyer at +1.
With Forsberg injured Jon Sim got some play time, he has recently been a healthy scratch. Seidenburg was a healthy scratch and was traded earlier today to Phoenix for Petr Nedved.
Nitty did let in some soft goals, but the entire team was bad. More mistakes by rookie defensemen, sloppy play, no energy. To me it looked like they really didn’t care. Sure they played harder after going down two goals, but they could never get the momentum.
Nitty gave up 3 goals on 7 shots in the second. I would expect the coach to change goalies, but Hitchcock decided not to. It really wouldn’t have hurt at that point. It’s not like Jamie Storr the backup doesn’t have any NHL experience. The goalie change might have woken up the Flyers.
Antero Niittymaki made his 17th straight start in net, the most for any goalie this year. The most for the Flyers since Tommy Soderstrom started 18 in a row in the 92-93 season.
The Flyers are on their longest losing streak of the year at 4 games. The games against Detroit and Colorado were considered benchmark games. The Flyers lost. They also lost to Carolina who is the hottest team in the east right now. Starting with the Boston game, the Flyers play 5 games against teams that are currently out of the playoff race, Penguins, Lighting and Montreal.
The Flyers need to win these games. If they can’t beat these teams what sort of chance do they have against playoff bound teams? I hear it all the time from other fans. “These games don’t matter”. “They don’t need to really try until the playoffs”.
Ugh, these games absolutely matter. If the Flyers had 6 more points last season they would have had home ice going into the division finals. But they didn’t and went 2-1 at home and 1-3 in Tampa against the Lighting with game seven score being 2-1. Home ice advantage can be huge in the playoffs.