Sielski: Flyers coach Hakstol is not smiling now

WASHINGTON - At 4:55 p.m. Thursday, Dave Hakstol polished off a pregame briefing with the Flyers' radio and TV crews, emerged from a curtained-off corner of the Verizon Center, and did the strangest thing: He smiled. Gone was the knifing glare that he often wields to a referee who has wronged his team, a player who has made an inexcusable mistake, a reporter who has asked a question that Hakstol didn't care to answer. His first playoff game as an NHL coach was little more than two hours away, and he appeared at ease, and he said the Flyers were, too.

"I'd probably be the first one to tell you: I think our group started to feel a little bit of pressure as we came down the stretch," Hakstol said. "We'd been on one heck of a run. We put ourselves in great position. But if you went back to last Saturday's game, at home against Pittsburgh, we were gripping it pretty tight for the better part of 30 to 40 minutes. But that was a new experience for our team, and we were trying to cap off the run and the push toward the playoff berth. I feel like that's put behind us now. We were able to accomplish that goal.

"Now, the focus is on the opportunity in front of us. Are we focused and relaxed? I don't know what words to use. You can use your own descriptions on it. But our team is ready."

It didn't look it. If Hakstol was counting on his players' letting go of the tension and anxiousness that had hindered them during the regular season's final week, the Capitals' 2-0 victory in Game 1 seemed a continuation of the jumpy, undisciplined performances that the Flyers delivered. That relatively narrow margin wasn't an accurate indication of the control the Capitals maintained for most of the night, of the way the Flyers struggled to play a clean, sharp game.

They mustered just 19 shots on goal, and they did themselves no favors by squandering three first-period power plays, then handing Washington six man-advantages over the game's final 40 minutes. The most innocent and controversial of those penalties - Brandon Manning's delay-of-game infraction for unintentionally batting the puck out of play - led to John Carlson's magic-bullet goal in the second period on a point shot that caromed off at least one Flyers player. That moment was bad luck, but the Flyers didn't create enough good fortune of their own. A turnover by Jake Voracek led to Jay Beagle's put-away goal late in the third period, but by then the Flyers hadn't given themselves enough opportunities to tie the game. They never gave you the sense that anything other than a random sequence of events might save them.

Yes, the Capitals are the better team. But the Flyers can be better than they were Thursday night, and they'll have to be to push this series beyond four or five games.

"We have to be a little more disciplined," defenseman Mark Streit said. "We took a lot of penalties, and that gave them a lot of momentum."

It also killed off what little the Flyers themselves might have generated. With less than seven minutes left, the Capitals' Tom Wilson seemed to provide the Flyers with that sliver of hope they needed by ramming Andrew MacDonald into the boards, a cheap shot that was going to lead to a Flyers power play. But Wayne Simmonds rushed in to avenge MacDonald, fighting Wilson and drawing a roughing penalty that not only wiped out the power play but kept the Flyers' leading goal-scorer off the ice for the rest of regulation.

"There was no rough," Simmonds said, but that's not the point. He can't give an official any reason to penalize him there. He has to be smarter. He has to recognize that in that situation, at that point in the game, he and his 32 goals and his presence in front of the Capitals' net are too valuable for him to sacrifice for the sake of sending a message. In essence, Wilson dared the Flyers to remain disciplined at a critical point in the game, and Simmonds blinked.

"That was his choice," Capitals coach Barry Trotz said, "not ours."

That was a stinging line from Trotz, but he was right. Look, the Flyers will have be nearly perfect to have a chance against the Capitals in this series, but they were too far from that standard Thursday. They were closer to the team they were over the regular season's final stretch than to the team they'd been in the weeks before, the one that pushed themselves into this unlikely postseason berth, that stayed on the right side of the line between aggressiveness and recklessness, between intelligence and passiveness. "I really liked our effort," Hakstol said. "There are some things we'll clean up and talk about." For what it's worth, he wasn't smiling anymore when he said it.