Taking part in their first two-game week since the opening week of the season, the Flyers enjoyed two road wins against Western Conference opponents on Friday and Saturday. Claude Giroux provided a pair of game-winning goals as Ilya Bryzgalov got back on track this week winning back-to-back road games for the first time since his shutout against the New Jersey Devils on October 8. Looking ahead, the Flyers face Sidney Crosby and Alex Ovechkin in their upcoming four-game week. Trailing 0-3 midway through the game on Friday, the Flyers scored the next four to win 4-3 in overtime against the Anaheim Ducks. Giroux slapped home the …
Atlantic Watch: 11/16-11/22
Matt Read provided an excellent game-winning goal for the Flyers on Thursday, but that was the only good news Philly received all week as they are currently enduring a two-game losing streak with several key players missing the lineup in the process. Chris Pronger, Braydon Coburn, and Jaromir Jagr are important players on the Flyers’ roster. Jagr plays an important role in Philly’s most productive offensive trio, while the defense must rely on AHL call-ups when both Pronger and Coburn are absent from the lineup. Negative results were witnessed when all these players were not available at the same time …
Atlantic Watch: 11/2-11/8
The Flyers may have absolutely clobbered the Columbus Blue Jackets on Saturday night, and the Flyers may have only been a shootout goal or two away from going 3-0-0 this week, but these three games weren’t the best Flyers team we’ve seen all season. Before their Saturday night massacre against the worst team in the league, the Flyers may have played 125 minutes as well as participate in a shootout in their first two games, but they really only showed up for a total of about 20 minutes. Inability to play a full 60 minutes was a problem last year’s Flyers …
Atlantic Watch: 10/26-11/1
The week opened up roughly, but it ended smoothly as the Flyers seem to be moving towards playing better after a 5-1 win at home against the Carolina Hurricanes. Giving up 14 goals in back-to-back nights, the Flyers lost in inexplicable fashion to two currently horrendous teams, who are both experiencing difficulties in play and personnel. Rebounding back from those two horrific losses, the Flyers spanked Carolina with both Danny Briere and Chris Pronger out of the lineup. The Flyers began the real Halloween horror show by suffering a 5-1 defeat in Montreal last Wednesday, giving the lowly Habs their first road win …
Five Reasons I Love the Flyers: Bob Shinn
Bob Shinn runs the Flyers Hockey Talk page and is a very passionate fan, as you will come to see in his post. You can also follow him on Twitter here. Below, he gives us the five reasons he loves the Flyers. 5. The aura I have been to a sporting event involving every team in this city, except for the Sixers, but I have been to basketball games, and nothing matches the atmosphere of a Philadelphia Flyers’ game. The passion and the attention are there for 60 minutes. No one is texting or looking for the cameras, waving to someone at home. …
Hard Choices Always Have to be Made
While us penguins continue to wilt in the usual Northeastern Summer heat, pining for the days when a cool iceberg awaits our collectively scorched behinds, thoughts about the upcoming (and too far off) season still seep their way into our Sun-addled brains. This is the first in a five-part series which intends to examine the ways the Flyers front office, though publicly professing to want to win the Cup by any means necessary, just ends up conducting business as usual year in and year out. It could have been said any time over the last 25 years: At the end of the painful …
An open letter to Paul Holmgren
Dear Paul, We’ve had our differences in the past. The lack of value you see in draft picks and prospects worries me. Your willingness to give picks away in trade, and hand out no trade clauses like candy was mystifying at one point, but now I have become numb to it. Additionally, the idea of putting all of your eggs in one basket, like you did this season, is far from an approach I prefer take. There’s still no guarantee that you’ll win the Stanley Cup, as we saw, and now we’re left in the same spot where we always seem to …
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 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 …
Trade deadline passes quietly for Flyers
The Philadelphia Flyers were dormant as the 2011 NHL Trade Deadline passed as of 3 p.m. (et). Flyers’ GM Paul Holmgren awoke from his slumber to make just one minor deal, acquiring prospect forward Tom Sestito from the Columbus Blue Jackets in exchange for prospects Michael Chaput and Greg Moore. Sestito will be assigned to Adirondack of the American Hockey League. “Well, he’s a big kid, I think he’s got 30-some-odd points down there in the AHL…he was there last year on an entry-level contract. I like the fact that he’s got a chance to play at some point for …