PHILADELPHIA — The question coming at John Tortorella after a vintage mess of a 7-4 Flyers loss Saturday hadn’t reached the end of the first sentence before he swung back at it. Might seem typical but not altogether inappropriate on the part of the Flyers’ coach.
After all, re-Torts had plenty of time during the course of the afternoon to prepare for an answer as to why his new-look Flyers found themselves trailing before they could blink, and backup goalie Sam Ersson would eventually turn away only 18 of the 25 shots that the plucky Anaheim Ducks fired his way.
“Stop right there!” Tortorella said in his best cop-show voice. “Don’t blame Sam for this tonight. He’s part of it, but it’s easy to look at the goaltender and throw it all on him.”
And in this case, easy doesn’t mean accurate?
“Not a chance,” Tortorella said. “That’s a team effort tonight.”
Indeed it was, as the Flyers’ offense, with its new wrinkle of taking chances in the neutral zone previously unseen since early in the Alain Vigneault Administration, joined with the opposition in this game to ramp up the skating excitement for the two-thirds-full Wells Fargo Center. Unfortunately for the home team, that wasn’t always the smart thing to do, and Ersson bore the brunt of the result.
“Ers is great,” said Travis Konecny, who not only scored twice but gave up a goal by gambling and losing on a turnover at the blue line when he was supposed to be trying to kill off a penalty. “He battles every day at practice, he competes when he’s in. We were flat when we started the game for him. It’s tough when you get challenged like that.”
For obvious example, Konecny used his own turnover, which helped produce the fifth Anaheim goal early in the third period.
“My mindset going into that is we were down two, and I was hoping to get some momentum,” Konecny said. “If I turn that one over after I gain the blue line, it don’t matter. I don’t know, I haven’t looked at it, I couldn’t tell if I whiffed it or the guy got a stick on it or what happened. But if I take one more stride … or even skate it up the ice?”
Maybe it doesn’t sap all the momentum gained from two previous Flyers goals that had halved an early Ducks lead.
Not that there was anything wrong with that, in Tortorella’s new-(f)angled view of his team’s game.
“Those plays worked a few nights ago when we scored three, that’s what I am saying,” Tortorella said of Konecny’s (mis)play, while referencing a win over Minnesota the prior game. “There were a lot of almost plays that didn’t work tonight. A couple plays on the power play, trying to get it to a guy and it gets knocked down. Things didn’t work. But what Sam had to go through a little bit with the Bronx cheers out there? That’s bull….”
And so they would all smell the blame.
“Obviously, we were chasing it and trying to create,” Konecny said. “We’ve been trying to do that more this year. But we kind of fell into what they wanted tonight.”
With Ryan Strome’s goal 58 seconds into the game, and the first of three by Frank Vatrano that created a 2-0 Anaheim lead after one, the game was well on its way to falling on the Flyers (4-3-1, 9 points). But their head coach has apparently decided that has to happen every once in a while for a team sacrificing cover-up defensive approaches for more goals and more ticket sales.
In other words, there might be an occasional crooked score going the other way, but maybe there’s a reason to come out and at least watch this team try to compete offensively instead of winning the occasional 2-1 game.
Call it fan-friendly hockey in the New Era of Orange.
Not that it’s easy on the backup goalie.
“It’s up to me to be prepared,” Ersson said, “and when I get the chance I’ve got to be able to deliver a lot better performances.”
“All game we were creating chances. I thought we controlled most of the play,” said former Selke Trophy-winning two-way forward Sean Couturier. “We gave up too many quality chances where it was … lack of execution. And they made us pay.”