The Flyers needed to get back to their game from last year – the one they’re banking on getting them on track and out of the early-season hole they dug.
Tuesday night in Boston was a start.
Against a Bruins team that has always given them problems, the Flyers kept to checking, pushing Boston entries as far outside as possible, and eating any and every shot that the Bruins tried to thread through unless Sam Ersson could take care of it himself.
The Flyers grinded to a 2-0 win on the road, but that only had to be the first step.
“It’s something I like to see happen for us to play two or three in a row,” head coach John Tortorella said ahead of Thursday night’s return home to face the St. Louis Blues. “Then it starts to be instinctive how we play. I think we showed more of our identity against Boston, on what our standard of play is and the style of play, minus still some struggling offensively, but you need to put two or three in a row.”
So make it two.
The Flyers stayed on their game and beat the Blues 2-1 to improve to 4-6-1 on the season.
They blocked more shots, a lot of them, Nick Seeler especially; kept their sticks in the way; and on the night’s first major break, Ryan Poehling skated through everyone and dished a perfect cross-ice feed to Garnet Hathaway for the game’s opening goal; then Bobby Brink tapped home the winner late on a neutral zone takeaway from Scott Laughton.
All the while, Sam Ersson was stellar again, stopping 20 of 21 St. Louis shots.
There’s still a ton of work to do, but the Flyers have won two in a row for the first time in an albeit still young season, and three of their last four, playing the game that caught much of the league by total surprise last season.
It definitely isn’t all pretty, but it’s a start.
“This is how we play,” Ersson said after the win in Boston from Tuesday night. “This is what gives us success. It’s tough to play like this, but we gotta do it if we wanna win games.”
When the star rookie returned to the bench, he stayed there for the next three even-strength shifts, not getting back on the ice until an offensive zone draw with 5:54 left in the opening period – outside of a run on the power play that didn’t amount to anything.
The rest of the period swung back and forth until Poehling and Hathaway connected on the opening goal just over midway through, and was defined by the Flyers staying committed to some heavy shot-blocking with Seeler the star of it all.
The hard-skating blueline stepped in the way of three shots through the first, including two on his last shift of the frame. The latter shot hit him square in the chest – he felt it, too – but it gave possession back to the Flyers so that they could clear themselves out of trouble, which was met with a standing O from the crowd as the puck exited the defensive zone.
By the end of the second, which the Flyers had titling more to their advantage – though without the results on the board to really show for it – Seeler had absorbed one more to make it four. By the end of the night, in 16:53 of ice time, he blocked six in total, and the Flyers 24 on the whole after eating 28 two nights ago against Boston.
But the Blues found the equalizer midway through the third when the Flyers lost track of Walker coasting in toward the net. A rebound fell straight to his stick, and the Flyers were still struggling to cash in offensively to pull away. Tie game.
Laughton sparked the answer though. The veteran center clung to Kyrou trying to skate with the puck through the neutral zone and stripped it away by the offensive blue line. He then slipped it to Brink on the entry, then Joel Farabee took it up the wall to send it right back to a crashing Brink who got enough of the puck to send it trickling by St. Louis goaltender Jordan Binnington.
The Flyers got the lead back, and sold out defensively to hang on with a couple more clutch saves from Ersson to make it to the buzzer.
They pulled off a gutsy win in Boston, but the next step was to string together another couple after.
They got two now, with a style of play that isn’t pretty – painful even.
But it’s a start.
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