For the first time in four days, since the close of their back-to-back last weekend on the road, the Flyers were back in action last night, looking to pull off a sweep of the season series with the Blues and quickly begin to gain back some of the ground that they lost in the standings while they were sitting with their long layoff. It was going to be a bit of an uphill battle — four days, even with practice time mixed in, is a lot of days to be off collectively — but the Flyers responded pretty well, and to even better overall results.
Of course, as has been the story for much of the season, it didn’t start out great for them. The Flyers didn’t sleepwalk into that first frame — indeed, they showed some quite positive flashes, as they seemed to get their legs under them quickly, skating well and bringing some pace, racking up a respectable volume of chances (12 shots on goal in total), and seeing their forechecking game clicking well — but a few stumbles, a few sequences of looking just a little out of sync came back to bite them, and they still managed to hit the first intermission down by a score of 2-0, and in need of another jolt when they came out of the intermission.
And it’s a jolt that, to their credit, they were able to find before too long — they weren’t able to get on the board right away, but they stuck with their process and just chipped away at it, avoiding getting frustrated while they waited for their opportunity (which was bound to come eventually, given the defensive weakness the Blues have been showing all season) to come to them, and eventually they did, as Rodrigo Abols was able to capitalize on one of his numerous good looks to get them on the board, and then Tyson Foerster drew them all the way even in the third period on an underutilized one-timer, getting them to overtime, where the win awaited.
It was a comeback and a result which, all told, with an improved process didn’t seem so out of reach as others have this season.
“Just a couple of missed passes,” Rick Tocchet said after the game. “I don’t think it was that bad of a start, I know the optics look… it’s just when you make a bad pass, that’s when it looks bad, but overall I don’t think it was that bad, but I obviously liked the resolve from the guys [coming back from] being down 2-0″].”
It will get to a point when congratulating the team for coming back from behind will begin to feel too rote, any assignment of moral victories will seem stale, but this isn’t that. There was further resilience displayed, to be sure, but the more encouraging piece of this equation was how the Flyers managed to avoid having too much rust settle in, and played one of the better of their sub-optimal first periods coming right off of that long layoff. It’s a small improvement, but it’s an improvement all the same in their push to draw their starts to games all the way up to the level that they need to be at.
“One of the biggest things for us here is we’ve gotta work on our wall work and puck possession touches,” Tocchet went on. “I’m not ripping the players or nothing, it’s just we’ve got to get better to get to the next level. So that’s something on the coaches, we’ve got to work with it every day, we were just talking about this week we have to do more drills where you gotta be able to handle a puck under pressure, touches, I think we’re not there yet. Like you know you look at other teams like the Vegases of the world, the Dallases, they got bigger guys and know how to handle things, and we can get that, we can get better at it. We gotta teach it, better body position, things like that. But it’s been better, it’s been getting better every game, so give the players credit, they’re trying to buy into it.”
The Flyers are under no illusions that playing games the way that they’ve been playing and beginning games the way that they’ve been beginning them, falling into deficits so frequently as they have been, is not going to be a model which leads them to long term success in this league. It’s a positive that they’re showing such resilience through this early part of the season, but that will only go so far until the tank is depleted, and the foundation of play is all that remains. The Flyers, for their part, are doing well to take the resilience where they can, and continue working on improving that foundation week over week. It’s not been an easy process, or a particularly rapid one, but it’s progressing all the same. They still had to come back, but the climb wasn’t nearly as steep, and that’s something.
Of course, the next big challenge will be showing that they can keep this positive trajectory going, and with the schedule picking back up again, they’ll have ample opportunity to work at that soon. All the same, incremental improvements are the name of the game over the course of this long season, and the Flyers saw the fruits of their labor paying off for them last night.