Flyers Survive Slow Start at LinesMaker

Flyers Survive Slow Start

PHILADELPHIA (NHL/Kimelman) – Fly­ers coach Peter Lavi­o­lette had spent seven days being asked pretty much the same ques­tion — how his team would han­dle a long lay­off — and had pretty much the same answer each time.

“That ques­tion got asked a lot this week, what’s going to hap­pen, how are you going to be after the lay­off,” he said. “I answered, ‘I don’t know,’ because the truth of the mat­ter is you don’t really know. You don’t know if your team is going to come out and be jump­ing or whether it’s going to take a bit.”

“A bit,” turned into the entire first period, as the Fly­ers didn’t get their first shot until 9:59 was left in the first period. By then, the New Jer­sey Dev­ils had put 11 pucks on Philadel­phia goalie Ilya Bryz­galov and had taken a 1–0 lead in Game 1 of their East­ern Con­fer­ence Semi­fi­nal series.

It was seven days between the Fly­ers’ win in Game 6 of the first round against the Pen­guins and the start of the sec­ond round against the Dev­ils. In that time the Fly­ers prac­ticed six days, usu­ally up-tempo, skating-oriented drills. The two pre­vi­ous days saw more of the game plan the Fly­ers were going to use against the Dev­ils imple­mented. Regard­less, though, it’s hard to sim­u­late game con­di­tions in a prac­tice setting.

“We had seven days off and obvi­ously we had some really hard prac­tices dur­ing the week, but prac­tices and play­ing games are a totally dif­fer­ent thing,” defense­man Kimmo Tim­o­nen said. “You can talk and you can try to make your­self ready for the game, but we were rusty in the first period … every­thing was off.

“They came out really hard. They were skat­ing, forecheck­ing [and] we weren’t. We were stand­ing still. We looked like we were off for seven days.”

“Nobody liked the first period,” Lavi­o­lette said. “Play­ers didn’t like it, I didn’t like it, fans didn’t like it. And we’re not going to be suc­cess­ful play­ing that way.”

Credit for keep­ing the deficit at just one goal was given to Bryz­galov. He stopped 14 of the 15 shots New Jer­sey had in the first 20 min­utes, includ­ing a great slid­ing stop on Patrik Elias in the game’s first minute, and another nice stop on a David Clark­son shot that was par­tially blocked by Philadel­phia defense­man Nick­las Gross­mann mid­way through.

“The good thing is Bryz was strong,” Danny Briere said. “Bryz kept us in the first period. There’s so much inten­sity in play­off hockey, sit­ting back for a week, not being in that mood, kind of set us back a lit­tle bit. Jer­sey had come off a huge win, they were still in that same mind frame … and they came out swing­ing. We were for­tu­nate that Bryz kept it close.”

The Fly­ers found the pace at the start of the sec­ond, get­ting goals from Briere and James van Riems­dyk 37 sec­onds apart mid­way through the period to take the lead and steal the momen­tum of the game en route to a 4–3 over­time win and a 1–0 series lead.

From mid­way through the first period through the end of the game, the Fly­ers out­shot the Dev­ils 36–15, includ­ing 22–8 in the third period and overtime.

“I’m happy to see the response from our team after the first period and in the last 45 min­utes,” Lavi­o­lette said. “It was a strong effort from that point out.”

“It looked pretty good to me the next 45, 50 min­utes,” Tim­o­nen added. “That’s the way we have to keep going.”

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