PHILADELPHIA – Should this season happen to end in an unfavorable way for the Flyers, an inability to sustain a modest winning streak might wind up near the top of the excuse list.
The Flyers entered their game against Utah on Thursday night riding the crest of a three-game winning streak, which was tied for their longest of the season.
Momentum, and a chance to stay in close pursuit of playoff-bound teams, seemed to be going the Flyers’ way.
Then, for some reason, the Flyers came out flat. And stayed that way. It wound up being a disappointing 3-0 loss at Xfinity Mobile Arena.
The Flyers were without the services of leading scorer Travis Konecny and defenseman Nick Seeler but those absences couldn’t be used as excuses. There just wasn’t a whole lot of noise made by the Flyers who did suit up for this game.
What little offense the Flyers did generate was handled by goaltender Vitek Vanecek, who recorded his first shutout of the season.
Maybe the pre-NHL trade deadline (Friday) had something to do with the Flyers’ unsteady performance but the players weren’t offering that as an excuse.
“I don’t think we played a good team game tonight,” captain Sean Couturier offered after the game. With a chance to win a fourth straight game, was there a little bit of complacency?
“I think we need to press for more shots,” Couturier said. The Flyers finished with just 16 shots, tying a season-low (Ottawa, Feb. 5). “I think we have to simplify our game, go to the net hard, drive the net hard. Get some bodies there. It almost feels like we’re trying to play on the outside. I think if we simplify things, then things will open up. I think we’re a little too content on playing on the outside.”
Coach Rick Tocchet went along with that assessment.
“It was one of those games where we didn’t push back,” Tocchet said. “It’s tough to swallow. We got to regroup.”
As for any pre-NHL deadline jitters, Tocchet sort of pushed that aside.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I thought we were prepared. Had a spirited practice (in the morning). Honestly thought we were going to have a good game. We lost a lot of battles. There wasn’t pressure when there were plays to be made. It just kind of snowballed.”
Travis Sanheim knows what is at stake in each of these games. To not be competitive was quite a letdown.
“Simply not hard enough,” he said of his team’s play. “They’re a team that battles hard on the walls, make it tough on you. It’s hard to win when you don’t win those battles.”
Sanheim was reluctant to use the trade deadline as an excuse.
“It’s hard to say, maybe for some guys I guess,” he said. “We’re in the thick of it. Just trying to win every game.”
Utah broke the game open in the second period with a pair of goals. The second one gave the Mammoth a two-goal lead and while the Flyers have been good at coming back from multi-goal deficits this season, this was too big a mountain to climb.
The first Utah goal came on a power play, with Nick Schmaltz doing the honors from just below the circle at 1:38 with a shot past goalie Dan Vladar. That was the 41st time the Flyers have been scored upon first by an opponent this season.
Goal No. 2 came at 8:03. Clayton Keller zipped behind Rasmus Ristolainen, broke in clean and sent a shot through Vladar’s pads.
A scoreless first period produced little in the way of scoring chances. Each team generated only four shots.
The Flyers tried using two defensemen on a power play (Sanheim, Cam York) but even that did little to force the issue. Philadelphia began the night 29th in the NHL on the power play at 16.2 percent, which is actually a slight improvement over their standing with the man advantage over the past four years.
Ristolainen knows this could have been his last game as a Philadelphia player.
“Those are things you can’t control,” he said for what seemed like the double-digit time the past few days. “I don’t worry about things I can’t control. I don’t really think about stuff like that. Tomorrow we see what happens.”
“It was obviously a big game for us, we wanted to sneak back in there. A tough one tonight. We might have gotten a little bit outworked, outbattled.”
>800 for Ristolainen
Ristolainen played in his 800th NHL game. He’s the 20th Finnish player to reach that milestone. Ristolainen’s 310 career points rank second among active defensemen from Finland. He is also fifth on the games-played list for all active Finnish skaters.
>Short shots
The Flyers head to Pittsburgh on Saturday for a showdown with the Penguins. . .Noah Cates went into the game leading the Flyers in plus-minus at plus-17. . .Trevor Zegras has scored on 18 of 29 shootout attempts (62 percent). That’s fourth all-time in the NHL. He trails only Petteri Nummelin (80 percent), Mason McTavish (69.2 percent) and Kirill Marchenko (64.3 percent). . .The Flyers failed to break the 20 shots mark for the 10th time this season.
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