VOORHEES, N.J. \u2014 The $64,000 question for the Flyers\u2019 woebegone power play is: How do you fix it?<\/p>\n
Five years of staggering through the wilderness, four of them ranked last in the NHL and one year \u2013 hold your applause \u2013 at next-to-last. It\u2019s nothing short of a miracle that the Flyers managed to make the playoffs this season with such a paltry success rate of 15.7 percent.<\/p>\n
Things did not get much better in the playoffs. Sixteen teams, and the Flyers currently rank 14th at 8.3 percent.<\/p>\n
At Wednesday\u2019s end-of-season media session with coach Rick Tocchet, the main topic of discussion was whether the coach believes he can fix the problem internally or if the Flyers need to find help elsewhere.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo walking in (last summer), the staff together we knew this was a five-, six-year problem,\u201d Tocchet said at the Flyers Training Center. \u201cIt\u2019s a talking point every year here. So right away for us was, we didn\u2019t want to make it such a focal point that it took away from other parts. But it is a focal point.\u201d<\/p>\n
There\u2019s been an ongoing search to find defensemen with quick, accurate shooting ability from the point, but no one has grabbed that position by the horns.<\/p>\n
Tocchet pointed out the Flyers incorporated a number of young players into the man-advantage situations, so they\u2019ve made adjustments.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re coming in fresh, which is great,\u201d Tocchet said. \u201cWe get fresh ideas from those young guys. I just felt that some guys were never \u2014 as soon as we hit the ice \u2013 I could feel tension from some guys.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve got to release the tension. And that\u2019s my job, to release that tension. Diving into it this summer, different way of scheming, different way of practicing. Maybe less information, sometimes giving too much information makes guys tighter.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Flyers did get off to a pretty good start. On Nov. 12, after 16 games, they were ranked 14th in the NHL at 20.4 percent. But things went quickly downhill from there.<\/p>\n
As for next season, the Flyers will make it a point to either improve through strategy or new personnel, either via trades or free agency.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re going to dive deep into it,\u201d Tocchet vowed. \u201cI\u2019ll be honest with you, I felt some guys went out there and you could just see it, they were clenching their stick.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tocchet wants his players to perform the way Carolina\u2019s did. The Hurricanes were methodical. They didn\u2019t try to make perfect plays. They tried to create havoc and fool the defense with misdirection. Carolina was fourth in the NHL on the power play this season, though just 12th out of the playoff teams at 13.5 percent in their eight wins.<\/p>\n
\u201cCarolina is the litmus test for me,\u201d Tocchet said. \u201cThey just go \u2018balls to the wall.\u2019 They just go hard. There\u2019s tension (with the Flyers). Talking about power plays, I didn\u2019t like our retrievals. A lot of time we had three against their two and somehow we never came out with those pucks. There\u2019s got to be improvement. And that\u2019s something we\u2019re really going to focus on.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"VOORHEES, N.J. \u2014 The $64,000 question for the Flyers\u2019 woebegone power play is: How do you fix it?…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":574307,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5107],"tags":[194,29,5176,5,195,4,43,15444],"class_list":["post-574524","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-carolina-hurricanes","tag-carolina","tag-carolina-hurricanes","tag-carolinahurricanes","tag-hockey","tag-hurricanes","tag-nhl","tag-sports","tag-top-stories-cvc"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nhl\/116571537638984580","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574524","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=574524"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574524\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/574307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=574524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=574524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=574524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}