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With the playoff race the tightest it’s been all season and head coach John Tortorella watching from elsewhere while serving a two-game suspension, the Flyers took two points they had to have from the San Jose Sharks in a 3-2 win Tuesday night at the Wells Fargo Center.
The effort took until down to the final horn once again, but the Flyers improved to 34-24-8 for a 76 points that will keep them at third in the Metro, though with a tough stretch coming up for a banged-up group starting Thursday night with the high-powered Toronto Maple Leafs right back here at home.
Until then, here are five thoughts from Tuesday night’s win…
Tape-to-tape
Early on, San Jose’s Marc-Edouard Vlasic tried to force a puck to the Flyers’ net, but it went straight to Morgan Frost’s stick instead, who with a spin and a prayer, stretched a pass from all the way across center ice to a Joel Farabee breaking free.
Frost connected. Farabee was all alone on the breakaway, and after a quick move to freeze goaltender Magnus Chrona. It was 1-0, Flyers.
The tally was Farabee’s 19th on the season, but only his first in four games and second in the last 19. Likewise, Frost’s assist was his first in five games after posting back-to-back two-point nights against Tampa Bay and then Washington going on a couple of weeks ago.
For the Flyers to succeed, both of these guys need to be going – Frost as an offensive, playmaking force, and Farabee as an instinctual two-way threat who can punish opponents for every mistake with the puck.
But neither really were entering Tuesday night, which has reflected in the team’s uneven results since coming back from Stadium Series just shy of a month ago – coupled with the injuries, of course.
Tortorella lamented Frost’s recent inconsistencies all over the ice in particular after Monday’s practice, which hasn’t been the first time. But to Frost’s credit, he responded with the play to spring Farabee, and then with what’s become a rare power-play goal for the Flyers off of a blocked shot that bounced perfectly to him from across the San Jose crease.
“I thought he played pretty good,” associate coach Rocky Thompson, who handled postgame media duties in place of the suspended Tortorella, said of Frost’s performance. “And I thought because it was such a special teams kind of thing, it was hard to get the flow. Like he didn’t play a ton of minutes tonight, but I thought he took advantage of the minutes that he did get to play.”
Frost skated 11:43 for the night, 3:43 on the power play, and his two-point effort saw him finish plus-1.
Hopefully, Tuesday night is a spark that gets both Frost and Farabee going because…
Offense needs to come from somewhere
But the well has been pretty dry for a bit, and it wasn’t just those aforementioned two.
Sean Couturier hasn’t had a point since Feb. 25’s loss to Pittsburgh, Tyson Foerster has been scoreless in the four games since Mar. 2 against Ottawa, and it certainly didn’t help to be without Travis Konecny due to injury from the Chicago game on Feb. 21 up until this past weekend.
It isn’t for a lack of effort either, certainly not Tuesday night. The Flyers generated a number of dangerous opportunities that left Chrona flailing for the puck, but unlucky bounces, Sharks defenders doing well enough to collapse in on their net and clog up lanes, or the Flyers just firing wide constantly kept them from doing damage on the board.
Take this scramble at the end of the second period:
They did everything but score.
Owen Tippett was looking at a stretch of just a single goal in the 10 games since Stadium Series as well entering Tuesday night, but he snapped that emphatically in the third period when he put home a perfect cross-ice feed from Konecny to give the Flyers the lead back, 3-2.
And like Frost and Farabee, Tippett needs to be finding the back of the net, too, for the Flyers to have a shot, which gets frustrating in stretches like this when they’re not – even when they’re clearly firing away as they were outshooting San Jose, 38-23, with 10 minutes left in the third.
The chances went both ways though. The Sharks, as lowly as they are now post-trade deadline, got a decent amount of looks down in the Flyers’ zone on a defensive corps stretched thin, but Samuel Ersson delivered a strong bounce-back performance from Saturday night’s blowout in Tampa, making 27 of 29 saves with the help of a couple of fortunate bounces off the post, too.
“Let’s put it this way, in my head, there’s not even a thought when there’s something going to the net,” Thompson said of his belief in Ersson. “I have confidence, not that he’s going to make every save, but I don’t have the feeling like he’s not. He’s earned that respect, in my opinion, over the last couple of months here. He’s done a really good job.”
Please mark No. 18
But the Sharks did find cracks in the armor, or rather, Filip Zadina was just allowed to skate straight to the net unmarked twice, both times with the Flyers on the penalty kill and as a result of glaring defensive breakdowns.
The first:
Staal just got caught on the wrong side of the ice entirely.
The second:
Just too slow of a shift from corner to corner between Cam York and Travis Sanheim.
They stung though, especially in a game the Flyers really needed two out of for the sake of the playoff race. But they survived.
By a toe
But also, man, did this stop from Ersson with the game still tied in the third bail them out big time.
Quite possibly saved the whole thing.
“That’s the nice thing about being a goalie,” Ersson said postgame. “You get to impact the game in a big way. That’s what you want. You want to have those moments come at you, and you want to come up with the big save.”
“He’s been a rock all year,” Frost said. “Everyone in the room has so much confidence in him, so never a doubt that he was gonna do that. He made some huge saves tonight.”
Protect the middle
And if they’re going to continue to in what’s looking like a tough stretch ahead starting with Toronto on Thursday night, they’re going to need all hands on deck – forwards, d-men, everyone – to try and put up their most complete defensive efforts of the season, which is way easier said than done given how banged up the defensive pairs are right now.
York and Sanheim are going to log heavy minutes (they logged 26:07 and 23:55 on Tuesday night, respectively), Egor Zamula and Ronnie Attard are going to have to step up in the biggest situations of their young NHL careers so far, and Staal and Erik Johnson, though seasoned vets, are at points in their careers where the situations they get put in have to be highly selective.
It’s going to be a lot to take on, and Tortorella noted Monday that the forwards have to be mindful of that and help out as much as they can, which will likely, in turn, affect how much they can do the other way against some high-powered offensive teams coming up.
The Sharks got their looks Tuesday night, but the Flyers were able to somewhat get away with them. Against the Leafs, Bruins, and Hurricanes though, they won’t – not at this point in the season.
Ersson is obviously going to need his best, but the Flyers are also going to have to really tighten up in front of him in the dangerous areas, because if you give the teams coming up over these next couple of weeks any ground, they can and will hurt you.
“We can only play one way,” Thompson said. “Whether we’re playing the Boston Bruins or we’re playing San Jose, we are good at our style of play, so there’s no easy nights for us. It doesn’t matter who we have, but when we can play that way, we give ourselves opportunities to be successful by the end of the night.”
Uni thought
The Sharks’ roads with the teal helmets are so sick.
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