The Flyers were pummeled yesterday afternoon losing 6-0 in Philly to the Tampa Bay Lightning. I guess the team meeting didn’t help much.

Fredrik Modin of the Lightning had a hat trick. Two games in a row now the Flyers have given up a hat trick. Former Flyer Sean Burke earned the shutout for the Lightning. He didn’t have to be spectacular, but with the Flyers play spectacular wasn’t needed.
The Flyers top line took 6 penalties. They also gave up 3 power play goals on 9 kills, one in each period. This against the Lightning who’s power play is 29th in the league. Flyers were also 0-4 on the powerplay unable to get a PP shot on goal until a minute left in the game.

Any good news for the Flyers from this game? Not really. The majority of the goals Nittymaki gave up were deflections or odd man rushes. The team in front of him was more responsible for the goals then he was. No energy, no drive, looked like they just didn’t care. Kim Johnsson left in the second period, he was feeling a bit dizzy. Chris Therien was a healthy scratch.

“I think we’re in a tough state right now. We have some adversity. Every mistake is in our net. We are not able to score on the chances that we get. We took too many penalties especially in the offensive zone. I don’t think it’s one thing. We were a team going very well for an extended period of time. In the last 10 days we have not played near as well as we are capable of. We didn’t match the level of intensity on a consistent basis. We had some players that played very well tonight but we didn’t match the level of intensity.” – Ken Hitchcock

Looking at the larger picture, the Flyers are just playing like crap. It has been longer than 10 days. Since the January 5 win over the Rangers, the 4 wins the Flyers have are against teams at the bottom of the conferences. Penguins 12 wins in 52 games, Capitals 17 wins in 49 games, Blackhawks 17 wins in 50 games. Every other game they have played they lost, against teams either in or close to being in the playoffs.
Instead of having another meeting to talk about what’s wrong I propose a different method. Take a page out of Herb Brooks coaching manual, run em.
Today at practice line them up along the goal line and just run them the entire practice, sprints, lines, herbies whatever you call them. Sore groins, elbows or shoulders, doest matter. Maybe that would wake up the team, a team desperately missing their captain. The gang of seven is apparently not doing a good job.

Stars of the game were Modin, Burke, St. Louis.

The last time the Flyers allowed hat tricks in two consecutive games was October 1999 Peter Bondra and Brian Savage. The Lightning have beaten the Flyers in seven consecutive regular season games. April 4, 2003 was the last regular season win the Flyers had against the Lightning. The last home loss this bad was against the Devils 7-1 on January 18, 2001. Seven games left before the Olympic break for the Flyers, it can’t get here soon enough.

Last week I gave NBC a thumbs up with their coverage of the game, the goalie cams were quite cool. This week I have to give them a thumbs down. No goalie cams this week, but that really wasn’t a big deal. What was a big deal was the horseracing. Between the second and third period instead of having highlights, commentary, etc there was horse racing. I don’t want to watch F-ing horseracing! It has absolutely nothing to do with hockey. This just strokes my pet peeves of TV broadcasts of hockey, mainly commercials. There is no reason to have commercial timeouts during the period. If they have enough time to show a F-ing horserace there is plenty of time to show all the commercials they want between periods. Players know when the timeouts are going to occur, happens around the same time every period. Ice the puck? Not a big deal, have a TV timeout coming up. Another little pet peeve is how close NBC (OLN does the same) cuts the game. If you have a Dvr/Tivo and are going to record the game to watch later make sure you also record whatever comes after the game, because if you don’t, 90% of the time you will miss the last few minutes of the game.