Quick observations: Carter Hart steals the Flyers a point in 2-1 shootout loss to Caps
The Flyers goalie made 35 saves to earn a hard-fought point against the best team in the conference.
Some quick observations from Wednesday’s night’s shootout loss to the Capitals.
♦ The Flyers earned a point for the seventh consecutive game thanks to Carter Hart. The Flyers goalie made 35 saves, but gave up shootout goals to T.J. Oshie and Evgeny Kuznetsov.
♦ Jake Voracek and Sean Couturier were denied in the shootout by Washington goalie Braden Holtby. Claude Giroux scored.
♦ Hart was breathtakingly good in regulation and OT. He stopped Tom Wilson three times late in the third, John Carlson twice in succession and survived Alex Ovechkin crashing the net with Giroux in overtime.
♦ Voracek is still in a scoring slump, but he made the Flyers offensive play of the night by skating around Radko Gudas and feeding Claude Giroux for the Flyers only goal. The Flyers were were 1 for 4 on the power play. They killed all three chances Washington had.
♦ After a sluggish first period, Flyers coach Alain Vigneault put his lines in a blender At one point in the second, Tyler Pitlick was out with Claude Giroux and James vanRiemsdyk. In the third, he put Giroux and Voracek together with Michael Raffl and they were terrific.
♦ The victims of the line shake up were Joel Farabee and Andy Andreoff, who played just one shift in the third period, and Carsen Twarynski, who didn’t play any.
♦ Nice to see Shayne Gostisbehere make a decent play where he danced past Tom Wilson at the blueline to get himself free for a shot on goal. The subsequent scrum led to a Caps slashing penalty. He has one goal in 17 games and could use something good to happen.
♦ A cheer went up when a dump-in nearly hit referee Chris Rooney. The natives still were a little salty when James vanRiemsdyk was whistled for a tripping penalty that was questionable at best.
♦ Wonderful flurry of play when the teams went six minutes without a whistle late in the second period. Travis Konecny hit a post and Andre Andreoff had a sprawling attempt turned away by Washington’s Braden Holtby. The flurry came after the Flyers killed off that JVR penalty.
♦ Triviality: This is the first time the Flyers had four consecutive games go past regulation since March, 2011. They had four straight go into a shootout, winning just one.