The Flyers, hitting the start of the month of February on a four-game losing streak and at the risk of heading into the Olympic break in free fall, managed to pull together a prompt shift in momentum. Picking up a reasonably tidy 4-2 win over their divisional rival Capitals, the Flyers lifted quite a major weight off of their shoulders, but still sit with a reminder that there’s work yet to be done.

Overcoming the noise

To deliver the understatement of the century, things have not been going great for the Flyers, of late. With Saturday’s overtime loss to the Kings, the Flyers closed out the month of January with a pretty abysmal 4-8-3 record (which also included two separate losing streaks of four or more games), and with answers to break the skid nowhere in sight — to say nothing of the discourse around the head coach’s handling of a key young player and his comments about it to the media breaking containment into the national sphere — the fervor of bad feelings around the team were reaching a point of criticality, and desperation time had well and truly arrived.

But it’s this particular desperation which made the eventual pulling off of this win ring even more meaningfully, as the Flyers got contributions — tangibly or not — from a number of different areas of their lineup. It was, in all, a well strung together effort.

“Yeah like stacking some good moments,” head coach Rick Tocchet acknowledged postgame. “Obviously giving up the lead [and letting it get to] 2-2, [and then] we get the power play, that was a big moment, right? Because the power play’s obviously been struggling, that was a huge goal for us. And then hanging in there and Risto getting that empty net. So yeah, some moments there that went our way, hanging in there. And I thought it was a great effort from the players tonight.”

Overall, this was not the Flyers’ most commanding win of the season. Finding a way to jump out to an early lead was an undeniable positive — it’s not something they’ve been able to do terribly often so far this season — but that lead was one they did leave the door wide open to get away from them. Between a couple of tough breakdowns leading up to the pair of goals against, which had the game tied for much of the third period, and a conceding of the edge in possession to the Capitals for much of the game in its entirety (the Flyers came away with just 43.02 percent of the share of shot attempts generated at 5-on-5), the Flyers didn’t necessarily make this an easy win for themselves, but they still managed to pull it off, taking their opportunities when they arose and putting out most of big fires when they needed to.

The Flyers, at the end of the day, went into this game and took care of business against a team that they really to find a way around — that is, a Capitals team that was both less rested on the back half of a back-to-back and dealing with some major injuries and icing an AHL goalie for the second night in a row — and found a way to return to their fundamentals along the way, and that counts for something.

“It was better,” Tocchet concluded. “I mean obviously we’ve had some blown coverages, like we’re up 2-0 and a couple of guys are going to the same guy [in coverage]… I thought we were better at that, I think at practice, we had a really good practice yesterday and that helps, but we gotta get [out of] that habit of going two guys to the same guy, there’s a read there that you have to make and it’s gonna take experience… but definitely it was better.”

This might not have been their A-game, but it was still a really solid B-game, and executing on that was enough to finally jolt them from this losing skid and allow them to pull off a big win.

Shifting focus

This was a big win for the Flyers, there’s no doubt about it, but in some ways the even more significant challenge still lies ahead of them. The Flyers have had no shortage of thrilling and meaningful wins that they’ve been able to pull together this season, and in many ways they’ve often looked their best when they’ve been rallying back from some deficit (be it on the scoresheet or more dramatically bouncing back from a deflating loss). But this is just the thing — the Flyers have not had as much trouble responding to difficult situations as they have continuing to build on the momentum they’ve gained from those major responses, and that’s largely what’s continually gotten them into trouble over this first part of the season.

Just as much as the Flyers need to find a way to deliver more consistent positive results down the stretch here, they need to find a way to begin to shift the narrative around them as a team who can’t play with a lead, in effect. The break looms large as a thing which will still halt (or at least pause) any positive momentum they build up over this last week, but it’s still important for the Flyers to find a way to hit that high note all the same. We’ll see how they fare in this regard tomorrow night back on home ice against the Senators.

All stats via Natural Stat Trick.