Flyers keep their cool in brawl, come away with crucial 5-2 win

PHILADELPHIA – When the stakes are high, all it takes is one big play to turn the momentum of a crucial game right around.
In the case of Wednesday night’s encounter between the Flyers and Penguins, that game-changer came during a melee at 4:33 of the second period.
With the Penguins leading, 1-0, the Flyers’ Travis Konecny and the Penguins’ Bryan Rust got into it and soon a bunch of other players did, too.
The Flyers wound up with a power play, scored on it and added two more to take a 3-1 lead.
From there, the Flyers went on to a 5-2 victory at Xfinity Mobile Arena and a 3-0 lead in their best-of-seven first-round series.
The Flyers can wrap it up with a win in Game 4 on Saturday night in Philadelphia.
It should be noted, in the 100-plus-year history of the National Hockey League, only four teams have come back from an 0-3 deficit.
After going 0-for-7 on the power play in Games 1 and 2, the Flyers got two PP goals in this one.
Goaltender Dan Vladar kept up his strong goaltending. He’s allowed only four goals in three games and has stuck his neck in front for possible MVP honors in this series. Both goals he permitted on Wednesday night came on Pittsburgh power plays.
The Flyers agreed that coming out of that scrum with a power play made the difference.
After the game, Garnet Hathaway went along with the idea that the Flyers won this game because they apparently kept cooler heads in the brawl.
Both teams had five players in the penalty box. It was like a scene out of the movie “Slap Shot.”
“I mean the crowd went bananas,” a smiling Hathaway said after the game. “We’ll be seeing that (image) of the guys sitting in the penalty box forever. I think we feed off of that. We’re a close group. You see guys step up for each other.
“We fed off of that. And then we fed off the crowd second. That’s where we grabbed the momentum. We took it and we ran with it from there.”
Nick Seeler also liked his teammates’ response. They held their own in the brouhaha but managed to come away with the crucial power play.
“Obviously in playoff hockey those things are going to happen,” he said. “I think it was just guys sticking up for each other.”
Even Konecny confirmed it was worth taking a few punches to the back of the head for the good of the team.
“Yeah, it ended up working in our favor,” he said. “We got something out of it.”
The way the Flyers played it smart impressed coach Rick Tocchet.
“Sometimes you want to hold your ground,” Tocchet said. “You learn from experience.”
Down 1-0 after the first period, the Flyers came storming back in the second, getting goals from Trevor Zegras, Rasmus Ristolainen and Seeler to gain a two-goal lead.
Zegras connected on a power play, the Flyers’ first with the man advantage in the series. He drilled a shot from the right faceoff dot past goaltender Stuart Skinner, glove side at 5:18. This came after a multi-player punchfest which gave the Flyers the man advantage and some possible extra energy.
Then it was Ristolainen’s turn. Again, he teed it up from the right dot and ripped a shot through Skinner’s skates at 9:06.
Not satisfied with that, the Flyers went back to work and got a goal from Seeler just 2:12 later. Seeler’s rising shot from the point made its way through a maze of bodies.
The Penguins closed the gap to a single goal at with their second power-play tally at 9:39 in the third period. This one came with Matvei Michkov in the penalty box. Erik Karlsson did the honors.
But the Flyers came back on their second power-play goal at 12:30. Noah Cates scored from close-range and the XMA crowd erupted.
In the opening period, Pittsburgh finally got on the board first.
The Penguins’ power play, scoreless in seven attempts in the first two games of the series, broke through at 4:18 with Sean Couturier in the box. The visitors worked a precision tic-tac-toe pass play with Evgeni Malkin finishing it off at the right post.
Although both teams finished the period with 11 shots, Pittsburgh had the best of the quality scoring chances.
The 2010 Flyers managed to come back from an 0-3 deficit in the 2010 playoffs.
In addition to the Flyers, the only other teams to come back from 0-3 are the 1942 Toronto Maple Leafs (over the Detroit Red Wings), the 1975 New York Islanders (over Pittsburgh) and the 2014 Los Angeles Kings (over the San Jose Sharks).

>Between the lines

The Flyers went with basically their same lineup as Game 2. Alex Bump and Emil Andrae were the scratches. . .In Game 2, Vladar became just the second Flyers goaltender to shut out the Penguins in a total of 43 games in their playoff history. The only other netminder to duplicate that feat was Martin Biron in the 2009 playoffs. . .In this year’s playoffs, the Flyers were the only NHL team to go 2-0 on the road to start the playoffs.