Before Fran Drummond, the artist responsible for the mask above as well as quite a few others in the NHL nowadays, had gotten this mask done I was afforded the opportunity to sit down with him and talk with him about this particular mask as well as a lot of other topics. There will be a full piece on him coming soon, but this is what he had to say about this particular mask when all that had been done were the sketches of what you see above (I will post the pictures of the sketches later): “One side has …
Flight Plan 04.03.2011
Sometime in June, anybody who cares about hockey played in North America will look back on the 2010-2011 season and try to analyze numbers and streaks and teams and players and everything. All of them will search to find turning points and why a struggling team got it together or why a team that had been good all year fell apart or why a team that was good all year turned it up a notch in the playoffs and won it all. Right now, anything anybody says is purely speculation. In June however, everything everybody says will be based on …
Flight Plan week of 03.27.2011
Two out of three ain’t bad… If you win that is. Unfortunately for the Philadelphia Flyers, they lost two of their three games this past week as they continue to struggle with consistency issues within games and positionally. The Flyers, as a team, played one of their better games in the second half of the season against the Washington Capitals, however the performances by both starting goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky and relief goaltender Brian Boucher were lackluster to say the least. Still, the Orange and Black were able to skate off the ice with one of the two available points to …
Flight Plan Week of 03.20.2011
The Philadelphia Flyers haven’t looked all that good recently, but they haven’t looked all that bad either. In their last five games, they’ve been able to muster up just enough effort and offense to get points in six of their last seven games and have even squeezed five out of a possible six in their last three contests. The big shootout win in Dallas was a little bit overshadowed by their inability to cap a comeback against the Atlanta Thrashers with a win in OT which saw Danny Briere score two goals including one with just 1:28 left in the …
Flight Plan Week of 03.13.2011
Ever hear that saying, “take one step forward and two steps back”? How about “two steps forward and one step back… off a cliff”? That’s what the Philadelphia Flyers did as you would think that last Sunday was rock bottom for the guys in Orange and Black when they took a 7-0 beating at the hands of the New York Rangers, but no. The Flyers were able to take any and all progress they had made in their previous two games against the Edmonton Oilers and the Toronto Maple Leafs and not only squander it, but revert back to a …
Flight Plan 03.06.2011
Every team in the NHL will go through lulls in their season where they won’t win games. They can play their best hockey of the season and still not get the bounces. For the Philadelphia Flyers, that isn’t the case. They’re playing terrible hockey. They’re not working harder than the other team. They’re not shutting teams down when they need to. They’re not scoring key goals. They’re not clicking on the power play. They can’t break out of the zone. They don’t get better, but worse as the game progresses. They just can’t keep their focus and right now they …
Flight Plan 02.27.2011 (Delayed)
There are just 20, count ‘em, 20 games left in the regular season schedule for the Philadelphia Flyers. It looks like they’ve hit somewhat of a slump as they are just 6-3-1 in their last 10, including a Saturday night loss to the Eastern Conference worst Ottawa Senators by a score of 4-1, and struggling to beat the second-worst club, the New York Islanders. None of this spells success, but since the Flyers still hold a pretty good lead over the next best teams in the East (five points and one game in hand over both the Boston Bruins and …
Flight Plan 02.20.2011
The Philadelphia Flyers won two of the three games they had last week and in only one of the games was the score separated by more than a goal after the final buzzer. If you weren’t sure that it was almost that time of year, you are now. The games will get tighter, they will mean more, two point games can now be viewed as four point games, and some team may even get in to the playoffs on a shootout win in the last game of the season. The great thing about hockey, particularly the NHL, is that somehow …
Flight Plan week of 02.13.2011 One Day Removed
The Philadelphia Flyers finally get a win after a long layoff, beating the Carolina Hurricanes after four days off and how do they follow it up after another little layoff? A second shutout loss in just 12 days at the hands of the Los Angeles Kings. Granted, this team has shown it plays better when they have a bunch of games packed into the schedule, but they should probably realize that teams looking up at the standings, and there are a lot of them, are going to be coming every game from about two weeks ago on out. The Flyers …
Flight Plan week of 02.06.2011
Consistent. If you’re a Philadelphia Flyers fan, over the past four years, you have never seen that word associated with the team you love. “Up and down” or “streaky” or “just plain bad” at times “unbelievably good” at times, but never were any of the teams over the past four years “consistent”. This team is the definition of consistent. They don’t win too many games in a row, they don’t lose too many games in a row, but they consistently show up and consistently get their points and that’s why they have the most wins of any team in the …