If you were just catching up on the news from the Flyers' West Coast tour this morning, you might think that the team was in a terrible accident, based on the headlines:
Slow Starts Killing Flyers
Flyers Getting Killed By Penalty Kill
Flyers Swallowed By Sharks
Rest assured, the guys are fine, but the point is well taken. This team needs new life, and fast.
I didn't expect such a dismal showing from the Orange and Black following their thrilling win over the Blues before Christmas. That game surely felt like a turning point at the time. But now, after one step forward, the team has taken a giant step back, allowing the Canes to leapfrog over them in the standings.
Our undisciplined play allowed the Ducks to win by more than a goal in nearly a month. Of course we can complain about the inept officiating in the Sharks game (not to mention, how Brent Burns got away without any supplemental discipline after his hit on Vandevelde boggles the mind) but that still doesn't excuse the total meltdown in the third period. And the final score from Los Angeles doesn't accurately reflect what transpired on the ice - uninspired play through two periods and the inability (due to lack of confidence?) or unwillingness to take shots on goal.
I don't envy the beat writers at this point. There are only so many ways to say that the Flyers don't show up in the first period, fall behind early, fail to play for a full 60 minutes, take bad penalties, allow the other team to capitalize after terrible turnovers, don't take enough shots... and on and on.
You get the idea.
We may have started a new year but the Flyers certainly look like the same old team. Lack of focus after a long layoff has plagued them for years.
Call me delusional, but I believe that the Flyers have enough talent to beat any team but they need to be dialed in, mentally. Wayne Simmonds and Brayden Schenn admitted that they simply were not focused on this road trip.
How to achieve focus and find and maintain mental acuity are tougher questions. Where does it start? Is it on Dave Hakstol to get in the players' heads? A sports psychologist? The captain?
I offer the following for your consideration. Sometimes it pays to look to the past and apply its lessons to the future. Perhaps the Flyers would do well to return to the five-man system implemented by Fred Shero back in the team's glory days. I recently revisited, among other things, Stu Hackel's article on Shero from 2013, and while it's worth a read in its entirety, this, in particular, stood out to me:
What [Shero] did was establish rules for his team to follow in all sorts of situations and formulate daily practice drills for his players to learn them, to the point where they became automatic in their execution. Among his famous sayings, written on the blackboard in the Flyers dressing room, was, "Perfection consists not in doing extraordinary things, but in doing ordinary thing extraordinarily well."
Today, that probably means that Giroux wouldn't be devoting much time in practice to the singular effort of scoring a goal off of the face-off.
Time for some new life, a new approach, and hopefully a renewed chance for the Flyers in 2016.
