After a 1-5-1 beginning of a season, victories of any kind are welcomed if not sorely needed. Thursday’s 2-1 victory over the St. Louis Blues is the third Philadelphia Flyers victory in their last four contests after winning a track meet over the Minnesota Wild last Saturday and notching their first road regulation win on Tuesday in Boston. Though falling to the rebuilding Montreal Canadiens on Sunday wasn’t optimal, it’s understandable given that the Flyers were in the second half of a back-to-back (in fairness, so was Montreal) and handed the net to 22-year-old Aleksei Kolosov for his NHL debut.
But not all wins are created equal. It will take more than one solid week for the Flyers to restore the version of themselves that fired on all cylinders in the middle of last season, not to mention rebuilding all of the trust lost over the last several years. Evaluating Thursday’s game a little deeper shows which areas of the team are trending in the right direction and where progress still needs to be made.
Flyers Can Ride Ersson if They Want
After starting the season with three back-to-backs in their first nine games, the Flyers won’t have to deal with another until the final weekend of November. The Flyers won’t leave the Eastern time zone until Nov. 27 and are home for eight of their 14 games next month. There is no such thing as an easy month in the NHL, but from a rest and travel standpoint, it’s rarely less strenuous than that.
That creates a different set of circumstances than the ones that caused head coach John Tortorella to run Sam Ersson into the ground at the end of last season. It’s apples to apples in some ways, namely the concerns surrounding the backup goalie situation, a role that has become Kolosov’s to lose, at least in the short term. But Ersson’s performance over the last two games (.978 save percentage, plus-4.18 goals saved above expected – per Moneypuck) affirms the strong play that preceded last season’s fade wasn’t a mirage…