Rick Tocchet’s Philadelphia Flyers (11-7-3) had an inauspicious start to a four-game Thanksgiving week road trip. On Monday evening, the Flyers suffered a 3-0 loss at the hands of the Tampa Bay Lightning. Tampa has won each of its last four games.
Monday’s game was rather low-event for long stretch of time. Meanwhile, Tampa put up a picket fence on the scoreboard: one goal apiece each period. The trio of Brendan Hagel (two goals, one assist), Nikita Kucherov (three assists) and Anthony Cirelli (one goal, one assist) did all the damage. For the Flyers, pressure was very sporadic.
Andrei Vasilevskiy made 20 saves for the shutout. In a losing cause, Samuel Ersson stopped 15 of 17 shots. Tampa’s final goal, scored with 15 seconds left in the third period, was a Hagel empty netter after Kucherov passed up an open shot.
Here’s the good, the bad, and the ugly from Monday’s game.
Ersson did his part to keep the Flyers in the game. He didn’t have to make a lot of saves but he had some tough one.
The second period was evenly played overall. Here’s the caveat: the Flyers coughed up multiple odd-man rushes. Meanwhile, when there were opportunites to create chances — and even a couple consecutive shifts in the Tampa zone — little came from them.
The bad
The Flyers unofficially had just two chances off the rush for the entire game. They had a mere six high-danger chances all game. They had a few good looks at the net but those either got blocked or missed. It was a rather easy shutout for Vasilevskiy.
There were a couple of occasions where the Flyers backed into the defensive zone when there chances to challenge or kill plays. They got in trouble on those shifts.
There was no special teams play until the third period. However, the Flyers gave up a shorthanded chance, and then took a penalty to negate most of their opportunity. Later, with less than four minutes remaining in the game, Egor Zamula took a needless cross-checking penalty. The Flyers lost two more minutes off the clock.
Emil Andrae got outmuscled on the first Tampa goal. Partner Jamie Drysdale was minus-three on the night.
The game in general was rather boring. There were long stretches with no whistles — eight minutes in the first period, for example, but little of note happened.
Philly produced a measly 1.87 expected goals for the entire game. That’s not going to get it done against Vasilevskiy and company.
Nicolas Deslauriers’ first-period fight with Curtis Douglas was just about the only energy or spark attempt of note for the game’s first 50 minutes. By that point, traiing 2-0, it was too little and too late. Patience and discipline are positives but a general lack of assertive rarely has a good outcome.
