Inside the Flyers: Flyers have to cut down on penalties

Play as a team. Concentrate on defense. Show more discipline.

For Flyers coach Craig Berube, those are the simple keys to a strong finish that will give his team an advantageous playoff seeding.

The first two goals, based on the team's play during the last few months, seem doable. The third one? Well, that's going to take the most work.

Exhibit A: Scott Hartnell committed two penalties in the first 4 minutes, 5 seconds of Saturday's hard-fought, 4-2 win over the New York Rangers. The Flyers killed both penalties, but they could have easily led to a Rangers goal or two and turned the game in their favor.

The Flyers have a penchant for unnecessary penalties and giving opponents too many power-play chances.

"We're lucky our penalty kill has been good, and we've gotten momentum from killing penalties," said center Claude Giroux, whose team has the league's seventh-best penalty kill.

In 29 games, opponents have had more power plays than the Flyers; the Flyers have had more power plays in just 17 games, while 15 games had an equal number of man advantages.

The Flyers are not overflowing with stars, so to win they need to play like a team, defenseman Kimmo Timonen said earlier in the week.

He might have added they need to play like a smart team and not worry about living up to the franchise's Broad Street Bullies identity.

The Flyers lead the league in penalty minutes and, after their game Saturday, were tied for the NHL lead for the most minor penalties (269) this season.

Not a winning combination.

In the last 40 years, only three teams - the 1974 and 1975 Flyers and the 2007 Ducks - have won the Stanley Cup while leading the league in penalty minutes, according to the Elias Sports Bureau.

Those Flyers teams had three future Hall of Famers (Bernie Parent, Bobby Clarke, and Bill Barber) and a multitude of talented, gritty players, while the Ducks had Teemu Selanne, Scott Niedermayer, Chris Pronger, Chris Kunitz, and Ryan Getzlaf, among other stars.

The current Flyers don't have a roster that is in the same stratosphere as those teams, so they must win games by using Berube's credo: teamwork, discipline, strong defensive play.

Sexy, no. Effective, yes.

"If there were a couple goals in my life, it was to win a gold medal, and the other one was to win the Stanley Cup - and we still have a chance to do that," said Timonen, who played his first game Saturday since returning from the Olympics, where he helped Finland win a bronze medal. ". . . When we play as a team, I really believe we have a good chance. And the way we ended before the break, the goalie is playing really well, and if we play as a team, we have a really good chance. But it takes everybody, and the way we played with Team Finland, we played as a team. We really didn't have any big stars other than Selanne.

"You play as a team and have a good goalie, anything is possible. The same here."

That is, provided the team stays out of the penalty box, as it did for the most part after Hartnell's two infractions Saturday. After that, the Flyers gave the Rangers just one more power play.

Goalie Steve Mason was outstanding during the early penalty kills.

"It's not the way you want to start a game, setting ourselves back by being down a man," Mason said. "But when you're able to kill penalties against an extremely talented power play in the first couple minutes, it's a good feeling and something to build off of, confidence-wise."

It's also living dangerously.

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