There’s no shame in the Flyers’ Game 2 loss. The Hurricanes are just better.
They weren’t afraid in a 3-2 OT loss. But the Flyers are the lesser team here, and it’s tough to see this deficit as anything other than impossible to bridge.
RALEIGH, N.C. — Travis Konecny wore the sheepish look of a scorer who had failed to score. He was standing in the bowels of Lenovo Center after it was all over, after the Flyers had fired 15 shots at Carolina Hurricanes goaltender Frederik Andersen through nearly 19 minutes of overtime, only to lose Game 2 of this second-round series, 3-2. Konecny had one of the best of those opportunities, a breakaway wrist shot that Andersen deflected but that might have sailed high and wide anyway. All that was left was the ruing.
“I should have finished that,” he said.
The Flyers piled up the should haves Monday night, and against the Hurricanes, against the No. 1 seed in the Eastern Conference playoffs, that’s a surefire way to lose a game that could have been won. Fifteen shots. Matvei Michkov put a point-blank backhander right into Andersen’s chest. Andersen padded away two Jamie Drysdale shots, one from the point, one from the slot. The Flyers were all over the Hurricanes throughout that extra period, until Taylor Hall slid a loose puck under Dan Vladař with 1 minute, 6 seconds to go. This was a William Munny kind of night for the Flyers: They didn’t necessarily deserve to lose. But in the NHL playoffs, “deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”
» READ MORE: Flyers squander two-goal lead, lose 3-2 in OT to fall into 2-0 series hole
“We played a good hockey game,” Flyers coach Rick Tocchet said. “Hard fought by both teams. I thought we played really well. After Game 1, I heard some people, ‘Oh, this is embarrassing,’ this and that. I thought the young guys competed. I’m really proud of these guys. They just made the play at the end. That’s it.”
For much of a 44-hour period, from the end of that bad 3-0 loss in Game 1 to the beginning of this close loss in Game 2, Tocchet had pleaded with his players to come to terms with what he was telling them, and what the Hurricanes had already taught them, about the unforgiving reality of the NHL playoffs.
Skating a shift in this league’s postseason tournament is just about the scariest thing in sports, and in that shutout on Saturday night, too many Flyers had looked too much like the terrified teens from a slasher movie. They had spent too much time reacting, not enough anticipating — too much hesitation, too little decisiveness, too much thinking about what to do in the moment, not enough thinking ahead. The Hurricanes swarmed them through the first 10 minutes, and if the Flyers didn’t adjust to Carolina’s relentless forechecking, they wouldn’t be back here for a Game 5. Their mission was basic for Game 2: Get to the middle, to the areas where most goals are scored. Fight through checks. Don’t fear carrying the puck.
“Find the hard ice,” Tocchet had said.
They found it early but not often enough, two goals in the first five minutes on Monday then nothing thereafter. Owen Tippett didn’t play in either game here. Noah Cates apparently injured his right foot. And after Hall’s goal, now that Carolina has a two-games-to-none lead in this conference semifinal, the Flyers are staring at the steepest of climbs, one they’re a little too young, a little too beat up, and not quite ready to make.
“We’ve been dead before,” Tocchet said, “and we’ve climbed out of the grave. We keep hearing we’re dead, dead, dead, but the guys won’t give up.”
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No arguing with Tocchet there. The hope, even in the highest reaches of the Flyers’ organization, had been that the team’s least experienced players would consider Game 1 a wake-up call and a valuable lesson learned. They had to feel the difference between a first-round series against a good Pittsburgh Penguins club and a second-round series against the second-best team in the league. Tocchet likened it to a baseball lineup timing the 100 mph fastball of an opposing pitcher. “We needed to see that pace,” he said.
They saw it, and they were better at handling it, but the gap between them and the Hurricanes is so wide that only a succession of great performances by Vladař can narrow it. Carolina is that good, that deep, that driven after reaching the conference finals three times in the last seven years and failing to break through to the Stanley Cup Final, let alone to win a Cup.
Vladař wasn’t perfect Monday night, not like he had been in that clinching Game 6 victory over the Penguins, but he was close. He bested Eric Robinson — a Gloucester Catholic alumnus — on two breakaways, slid to his left and stacked his pads to stop a Nikolaj Ehlers one-timer with less than six minutes left in regulation, then fended off a Robinson spin-and-fire shot from the slot early in overtime.
“He was unbelievable,” Drysdale said. “He kept us in it.”
He made 40 total saves, but after Drysdale and Sean Couturier scored 39 seconds apart early on, he got no offensive help from his teammates. There was hard ice to be had, and the Flyers found it too infrequently until overtime. They played their guts out. They weren’t afraid. But they were big-time underdogs before Game 1, and now it’s tough to see this deficit as anything other than impossible to bridge. Maybe Konecny was right. Maybe he should have finished Game 2 sooner. Maybe this series should be tied. But maybe doesn’t count.
