Monday, April 24, 2006

The lights are dim on Broad Street too!

They’re too slow, they’re too lumbering and they’re not looking very good. The Philadelphia Flyers have now had their helmets handed to them twice in three nights, Monday saw the Buffalo Sabres get to Robert Esche, gaining five goals on ten shots. That tells you all you need to know about how bad the night went for the gang from Philadelphia.

The Sabres came out flying as they say and never looked back as they punished the Flyers for miscues in their own end, took advantage of Philadelphia’s overly aggressive and thus punishable moments and filled the net behind Esche.

By the time the carnage had come to an end the Sabres were ahead 8-2 on the scoreboard and 2-0 in the series, a complete domination of a Flyers team not seen in many years.

For whatever reason, the Flyers can’t seem to wrap their heads around the idea that penalties will not aid their cause and neglecting their own end of the rink will come at a high cost. Broad Street Bullies no more, its more like they've become the Broad Street bone heads.

Buffalo on the other hand has this new NHL all figured out, or so it seems. They use their speed to their full benefit, beating the Flyers to the corners, moving through the neutral zone with speed and taking control of the Flyers end of the rink as if it were their own.

The Sabers benefited from not one but two hat tricks on the night, an unusual thing at playoff time to say the least. J. P. Dumont and Jason Pominville became the first tandem since Mario and Jaromir in 1996, to get the dual tricks, pretty good company to be mentioned with!

The more the Sabres scored, the uglier the Flyer mood seemed to get. Culminating in an incredibly dumb move by Denis Gauthier with a viscious cross check into the boards in the second period, for his troubles Gauthier was ejected from the game. Ben Eager followed Gauthier into penalty trouble in the third as he was assessed with a ten minute misconduct as thing deteriorated on the ice as the third period carried on.

The key if Philadelphia wishes to have any hope in this series is to stay out of the box, on the ice and in the face of the Sabres. They don’t seem fast enough to keep up, so they need to pin them into their own end and fore check them into turnovers.

Unfortunately for Flyer fans, their tempers and frustrations are running the show at the moment and with the expected result. Should they keep that up, they’ll find more of the same in front of their own crowd on Wednesday night. Buffalo doesn’t appear to be easily intimidated, instead they turn around and make the Flyers pay for the mistakes.

Mistakes they make far to often and there are results on the scoreboard that testify towards that, and testify loudly!

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