No, that's not just a bad pun in the title. The Flyers peppered Buffalo's Ryan Miller with 35 shots, but he stopped them all as the Sabres won 1-0 and took a 1-0 lead in the Eastern Conference Quarterfinals.
You can say what you want to say about how Sergei Bobrovsky finished the regular season, but last night, the rookie goalie was excellent. Bobs stopped 24 of 25 shots he faced and got the early playoff jitters out of the way as quickly as possible. He looked more like the goalie that had a surprising start to the year and forced Michael Leighton down into the minor leagues than the goalie that scuffled so much throughout most of March and April, and that's a good sign. For the Flyers to get anywhere in the playoffs this year, they're going to need to have good work from both Bobs and Brian Boucher in net.
Of course, they're also going to have to score a few goals along the way as well. Last night was just more of the same from the offense of late, as the Flyers failed to score on five power plays, including a game changing five on three chance that the Sabres were able to kill off. Despite the effort from Mike Richards and James van Riemsdyk, the Flyers just couldn't get anything going for very long in the offensive end. The power play failure might be where the Flyers are missing Chris Pronger the most right now, because Pronger is excellent at getting the man advantage set up and keeping the puck in the offensive end. With him out, the power play has been one of the worst in the NHL and is showing no signs of getting any better any time soon, and that's a big problem for this Flyers team.
Hopefully, the Flyers can get Pronger back for at least part of this series, because that could be a huge momentum shift for this team. They need to get something going on the power play, because those failures were the primary reason that the Flyers lost the first game of this series. They didn't look horrible last night. In fact, they looked a lot better than they had over the past few weeks when they squandered the top seed in the Eastern Conference away. However, just looking better against one of the hottest teams in the NHL coming into the playoffs isn't going to get anything done. All it's going to do is get this team sent home for the summer that much quicker.
Last night's game was a step in the right direction, but it wasn't a win. The Flyers need to come out tomorrow night for Game 2 with more fire, more passion and a game plan that will ensure that this series is tied going up to Buffalo for Games 3 and 4. Bobrovsky was excellent, and it wasn't really his fault that the Sabres were able to score, but he needs to do more of the same as well. Ryan Miller is one of the best goalies in the NHL when he's hot, and right now, he's very hot. This isn't going to be an easy series to win, but the Flyers showed a lot of heart in last year's playoffs. Now, they just need to find it again.
Game 2 is tomorrow night in Philadelphia. Hopefully, the Flyers can break through and get this series tied. If not, it might not even come back to the Wells Fargo Center.
No comments:
Post a Comment