The Flyers lost a humiliating game to the Sabres in Buffalo last night 9-1.
While the game was scoreless in the first, the Sabres buried the Flyers in the second period scoring 6 goals on 12 shots, 3 of those goals coming from the power play. Jeff Carter scored the only Flyers goal early in the third only to have the Sabres answer scoring again 24 seconds later. Add two more after that for the Sabres and you have a 9-1 Buffalo win. No hat tricks with all those goals with 7 different Sabres scoring.
Robert Esche was in net giving up 9 goals on 37 shots. Interesting that he was not pulled in the second or third which would normally happen when a goaltender is getting lit up. So why wasn’t he? Could it be that Hitchcock left him in because of Esche’s ‘Hitchcock has an empty head’ comment? Eh, could be. Another reason would be Niitty’s hip. It’s obvious by the play of the two goaltenders that Niitty is the #1 guy, why play him and take the chance of him aggravating his hip over a loss? Also the majority of the goals can’t be put on Esche. Odd man rushes, blown defensive coverage’s, multiple second chances all were huge in the game for the Flyers and they happened often.
My favorite defensive whipping boy did not disappoint. Derian Hatcher finished a -3 and was on the ice for 6 of the 9 Sabre’s goals. Can’t blame the game on Hatcher the entire team sucked ass. Hatcher was just the worst of the bunch. The Flyers actually out shot the Sabres 38-37 but the quality of chances Buffalo created were a whole lot better then what Philly could do.
The Flyers were held scoreless again on the power play going 0-5 while giving up 3 on 6 attempts on the penalty kill.
How about some quotes
Coach Ken Hitchcock
We’re going to win as a team and lose as a team. This is not on Robert Esche. Robert Esche played great. He played great in the first period, he played great to keep it where it was, he did a great job.
Captain Peter Forsberg
I’ve never lost a game like this ever in my career. So it’s a tough day. It’s one thing if you can blame the goalie, but Esche wasn’t the blame. Two-on-ones, three-on-ones, open nets. It was not a fun day. We do lack confidence here and we have to make sure we stick together. We can’t just look around for anybody else, we have to look at ourselves and me personally. I need to make sure I lead the right way. The good thing is this is early in the season and we have time to recover. But we better do it quickly. This is not going to get us anywhere.
Robert Esche
We’ve got to get better, and get better in a hurry and that’s all there is to it. Whether I had a bad game, good game, great game, it doesn’t really matter. Our goal isn’t to just show up and play well in games. Our goal is to win the Stanley Cup and we better get better in a… damned hurry.
Mike Richards
It just snowballed. It kept getting bigger and we didn’t stop it. It seemed like we didn’t have enough guys wanting to stop it. Typical Philadelphia Flyers hockey game there. We got behind the eight ball, we had a little bit of pressure on us, and we folded.
The character on this team is not showing right now. We’re getting behind in games and we seem to implode. We’ve got way too much character on this team to be doing that.
Derian Hatcher
We have to realize [this loss] was a big thing, it’s something horrible. And as much as we can’t dwell on it, we have to look at this and figure out what happened.
What happened is the Flyers played like a group of individuals that didn’t care about defensive coverage and not a TEAM which is a big key to Buffalo’s success.
Vanek, Afinogenov, Miller were the three stars.
So this puts the Flyers at 1-4-1 and the Sabres at 3-0-3, well not actually but that’s how I am going to track the shoot outs. I never liked the idea of a shoot out. Creating an artificial breakaway to decide which team gets 1 point after playing 65 minutes for the other point is just down right stupid.
The NHL tries hard to compete with the other big sports in the U.S. and just doesn’t get it. Does MLB baseball have a homerun derby after 9, 10 or even 15 innings? Does NFL football have a field goal competition or let each team throw 3 balls for touchdowns at the end of regulation? Does NBA basketball have a 3 point competition at the end of regulation? Of course not since putting that much emphasize on a single artificial game type scenario is just plain dumb. The fans love it they say, sure some do.
The fans also love a good 5 on 5 game instead of the special teams affairs the new NHL has become. The fans also love a game with good flow without the continuing stoppages of play for the added penalties, along with the increasing amount of commercials that fans have to sit through. The fans also love the fisticuffs no matter what general ‘sports experts’ say. Even though fans love it, steps were taking to diminish fisticuffs and they worked. Why do this? It seems the NHL has tried to make the game more respectable with limiting the fighting. In theory this would draw more fans to the game. Has it worked? Given that attendance around the league is down I would say no.
I figure the changes in the game are a wash. They lost some fans with the new bullshit rules and picked up some fans with the ‘new NHL’ moniker. The problem with the NHL is it is an international game. Out of the 20 or so players how many can U.S. fans identify with? 24 of the 30 teams are in the U.S. But the majority of the players are either Canadian or European. This is the same problem open wheel racing has in the U.S. So what’s the solution? Nothing. While the NHL should continue to market the game to try to increase the fan base they should stop dickin with the game. The game survived for decades without the artificial breakaway or the extreme fisticuffs related penalties toward the end of the game and it would do fine in the future without these added ‘features’.