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Meltzer's Musings: 4-13-10 |
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There seems to be a popular sentiment that the New Jersey Devils were the best possible matchup for the Flyers in the first round of the playoffs, based on the fact that the Flyers finished 5-1-0 against their Atlantic Division rival in the six-game season series. In the most recent meeting (March 28 at the Wachovia Center), the Flyers won by a 5-1 count.
While I think the Flyers have a shot at winning the series against New Jersey, hockey history has shown that regular season results are an unreliable predictor of postseason outcomes. Tomorrow's Daily Drop at Versus.com will go in-depth about the reasons why you can't put stock in the regular season outcomes between two teams when assessing a playoff matchup between them.
In a nutshell, regular season series depend as much on when you happen to catch a particular opponent -- e.g., a lot of games early or late in the season, in the midst of a particularly hot or cold streak, at the tail end of a road trip, at the end of a three-game-in-four night stretch, etc -- as it does how your team's personnel stacks up against theirs. In the playoffs, match-ups and strategic adjustments become much more important.
In assessing the series on paper, the first area most pundits will harp on is goaltending. Obviously, Martin Brodeur versus Brian Boucher seems like a titanic mismatch, even if Brodeur struggled against the Flyers during the regular season this year (1-4-1, 3.34 GAA, .878 save percentage). The Flyers caught him at his low ebbs of the season -- the opening week and right before the Olympics. Brodeur has had a recent history of looking fatigued in the second half of the season -- with a carryover into the playoffs -- but he looked just fine late in the regular season this year (0.99 GAA, .954 save percentage, two shutouts in his final six starts).
As for Boucher, the Flyers can only hope that he doesn't allow anything soft and minimizes preventable rebounds. The club hopes he builds confidence from his solid play in three of his four final starts. He has always been a streaky goaltender, capable of reeling off five or six excellent starts in a row but equally capable of going stretches of games where he doesn't even look like an NHL goaltender.
On the defensive side of the puck, the Devils (like most every Jacques Lemaire club) keep scoring chances to a minimum and are exceptionally tough to play catch-up hockey against. In the Flyers home-and-home sweep of New Jersey the week before the Olympics, they twice pulled off the feat of erasing deficits to come and beat the Devils. It should be noted that the Devils had recently acquired Ilya Kovalchuk and things were thrown a bit out of whack, team system wise, until he got acclimated. The Flyers cannot hope to rely on additional comebacks against New Jersey if they are to win this series. Chasing the game against New Jersey remains exceptionally tough. It's not for nothing that the Devils were the NHL's toughest team to score against this season.
Offensively, the Flyers are going to need to get balanced scoring. I don't foresee any one player or line singlehandedly carrying this club, although there are sometimes surprise heroes that emerge throughout a playoff series.
There will also be a media big focus on team discipline (with most eyes on Scott Hartnell and Dan Carcillo). Even if penalties are successfully killed, having to do so repeatedly wears down the team and takes it out of its flow. I don't think the club can afford to worry too much about avoiding penalties, but Hartnell in particular needs to know when to avoid gratuitous fouls behind the play and in the offensive zone.
Philadelphia Flyers Blogger •NHL.com • 
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