With their 4-3 win over the Chicago Blackhawks on Saturday, the Flyers broke out of the mold they’ve been stuck nearly all season.
The Flyers’ most recent wins may not have come on back-to-back games, but Saturday’s win accomplished something the 2021-22 Flyers have not been able to do often this season: It stopped another losing streak.
Before Saturday, once the Flyers lost two in a row, another losing streak was a valid concern. When the Flyers have lost this season, they haven’t lost just one or two games. They’ve suffered through losing streaks three times, including slumps of 13, 10, and six games. Through those losses, they’ve seemed snakebit, with injuries piling up and bounces going against them.
The last time the Flyers lost just one game was in December when their 3-2 defeat to Montreal divided wins over the New Jersey Devils and the Ottawa Senators. Before that, the Flyers had not been able to stop the losing at one game since Nov. 13 when they lost, 5-2, to the Dallas Stars between wins over the Carolina Hurricanes and the Calgary Flames.
The latest Flyers victory strayed from the prevailing story line of the season. Just as the season’s results have spiraled, things within games tend to spiral out of control as well.
But the Flyers scored first against Chicago, which has not happened often. The Blackhawks scored two unanswered goals, which usually makes the Flyers fold, but they came back instead. And then the Flyers finished strong instead of giving it up in the final minutes.
“I think the way things have gone this year, it seems like everything kind of ends up at the back of our net when we’re up a goal and there’s only five minutes left,” Kevin Hayes said. “But yeah, it would have been pretty easy to kind of just come off the third and feel bad and ‘Ah, we’re going to lose another game,’ but I thought guys responded really well.”
The response came after interim coach Mike Yeo broke from his own pattern. While he reacted to other losses by saying he was seeing the process develop despite the lack of results, after the 5-4 loss to the Minnesota Wild, he called out his team. He said that it was on the players to initiate change and that they needed to choose how they responded.
His message, so different than the one he had sent for weeks, was received.
“Team got called out pretty loudly by our coach,” Hayes said. “And I thought the boys responded the right way.”
In addition to Yeo’s challenge, the elevated play was also the result of a change in the Flyers’ fortunes on the injury front. In the last six games, the Flyers have seen five players — Hayes, Derick Brassard, Joel Farabee, Patrick Brown, and Rasmus Ristolainen — return from injury. Hayes and Brassard have both tried and failed to come back numerous times this season, but things looked positive after the Blackhawks game.
In true fashion for this season, the Flyers did lose another player the same game Hayes came back. Kevin Connauton left the game after getting slammed into the boards. However, the Flyers are now seeing more players returning than leaving.
After losing by two goals or fewer in five of the last seven defeats, the Flyers needed a push to help them finish games. With the challenge from their coach and the return of important players, they were able to respond after a disappointing loss in a way they haven’t since the start of the season.
