Even with the playoffs seemingly out of reach, the Flyers did enter Monday night’s game at Tampa Bay with at least one small incentive to prevail.
The Flyers could have swept the season series from the Lightning but even that moral victory was out of reach.
Tampa scored a goal in the first period and goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy made it stand up as the Flyers went down to a 2-0 defeat at Amalie Arena. It’s the second straight shutout loss suffered by the Flyers and the seventh time this season they have been blanked.
Philadelphia, opening a five-game road trip, has lost seven of its last eight games.
No fault could go to Flyers goaltender Ivan Fedotov, who held the high-powered Lightning to a single goal until the final minutes when he was pulled in favor of a position player.
“I thought ‘Feds’ played really well,” said coach John Tortorella to open his post-game comments. “We had a couple really good looks to score, we don’t. I don’t have any (expletive) how we played. I thought we played hard, checked really well. The patience of it was really good. We just needed someone to score a goal.”
The Flyers, who defeated the Lightning in their first two meetings this season, had five power-play opportunities and couldn’t cash in on any of them. They are now four-for-47 with the man-advantage since Feb. 27.
“Not good enough,” Tortorella agreed. “In that type of game, when we’re there, we’re very sharp with our changes, sharp with our checking, we need a play off our power play and we didn’t get it.”
Fedotov has been put in some tough situations of late but has come through. He had that brilliant performance in a win at Winnipeg and Monday night’s was right up there with his best.
“I felt really good,” Fedotov said. “I tried to help the D-guys behind the net, stop the puck. I tried to do my best. It’s important for the whole team, for that support.”
A giveaway by Travis Konecny led to the only goal of the first period.
With the teams skating four-aside, Konecny fumbled the puck at the Lightning blue line, sending Nikita Kucherov free on a breakaway. Kucherov raced in and sent a shot past Fedotov at the 18:31 mark.
Konecny has only one goal in his last 18 games. He took the blame for Tampa Bay’s first goal.
“We played well, other than that mishap that I had,” he said. “They get a break there. We were right in that game the whole time.”
The Flyers posted 41 official hits for the game, which has to rank among the most physical games of the season and shows that the players’ minds and hearts are still in it.
“Every team’s got top players so if you can get a bump on them, it keeps them guessing,” Konecny said. “On the power play, we have to keep putting them there to the net. Shoot at the right time. Guys are getting better at that, picking their spots.”
These two teams usually wages some wide-open battles but checking was the name of the game the rest of the way.
Tampa scored an empty-net goal by Jake Guntzel with 1:30 to play on a power play.
>Tortorella candid about team’s woes
In Part 1 of a four-part series airing on NBC Sports Philadelphia, Tortorella spoke openly about his team’s woes this season.
No. 1 reason for the likelihood of not making the postseason for a fifth straight season, according to Tortorella, was the loss of former starting goaltender Carter Hart, who is no longer with the Flyers and not playing in the NHL at the moment.
Hart left the team midway through last year after he was caught up in off-ice issues from a number of years back. He is no longer property of the Flyers and they have had to make do with Samuel Ersson as the regular starter and Ivan Fedotov and Aleksei Kolosov as backups.
“Number one is Carter Hart leaving the organization,” Tortorella said. “Our goaltending situation just got thrown into a tizzy. When that situation happened, it’s hard to recover right away. It’s the most important position on your team. It forced ‘Ers’ to develop quicker.
“I said at the beginning of the year I was worried about that. It’s something we still have to straighten out. It’s a big hurdle to fix because of how it happened, losing Carter in the middle of the year. Just
>Short shots
The Flyers return to action on Thursday when they play Washington in the second game of their five-game road trip. . .Garnet Hathaway and Rasmus Ristolainen remained on the Flyers’ injured list for Monday night’s game. . .Flyers held Tampa without a shot for the first 12 minutes of the second period. . .Vasilevskiy recorded his fifth career shutout vs. the Flyers.
