After a tough start to last night's game in Dallas, the Flyers went on to have relatively little trouble in dispatching a good Stars team by a 4-1 score. The Stars had no solutions to solving the returning Claude Giroux and his linemates, and the Flyers methodically dismantled their opponent over the course of the game.
Of course, the big story from last night's game was Giroux's four-point night (1G, 3A) in his return from a concussion. He instantly regained the NHL scoring lead despite missing four games. Giroux put on a dramatic display of how his presence elevates the Flyers' attack to another level.
Although the Stars have been the NHL's best comeback team since the start of the 2010-11 season, Dallas never really mounted a serious threat to come back on the Flyers once Philly grabbed the lead. Credit goes to the Philadelphia forecheck, generally solid team defense over the course of game (minus the first 5-6 minutes of the opening period), and a couple of momentum saves by Sergei Bobrovsky at crucial junctures of the game.
In particular, Bobrovsky's stop on Radek Dvorak when Dvorak went in alone after Andrej Meszaros slipped near the blueline sent a message that he and his team had full control of the game. Had the Stars scored there, the complexion of the game may well have changed. Those are the sorts of chances the Stars generally pounce upon to start one of their patented comebacks.
If not for the play of rookie Stars goalie Richard Bachman, last night's game probably would have turned into an outright blowout. He had no chance on any of the four Flyers' goals and robbed Philly on three other plays where the defense was out of position and a Flyers shooter had a point blank shot.
Whenever you get a clash between two division leaders, the respective teams' best players need to step up. Last night, Giroux (and Jaromir Jagr) did in a big way, while Jamie Benn and Loui Eriksson, despite assisting on Michael Ryder's early goal, were pretty much invisible while the game was still up for grabs.
One sign of how thoroughly the Flyers controlled the game last night: ice time distribution. Peter Laviolette was able to get all of his skaters (except Tom Sestito, who was assessed a 10-minute misconduct in the second period) at least 10 minutes of ice time. He was also able to limit Kimmo Timonen to 18:32. That was just what the doctor ordered in the middle game of a three-game-in-five-day road trip across three time zones.
The chippy play last night was not unexpected, despite the fact that the Flyers and Stars do not play one another very often. As I blogged yesterday, both teams have more than their fair share of trash-talkers and aggressive players and both are prone to bad minor penalties.
Philly handled it better than the Stars did last night, as Dallas completely lost its discipline. There were a few awful penalty calls both ways -- in particular, an interference penalty on Zac Rinaldo and a phantom elbowing call on Mark Fistric.
The unsportsmanlike conduct penalty on Vern Fiddler was a good call, in my opinion, because players are no longer able to police the game themselves. In a different era, the gratuitous snow shower that Fiddler gave Bobrovsky would have triggered an instant fight. When Fiddler got called on it last night, I immediately thought about an infamous 1981 AHL incident in which the Maine Mariners' defenseman Glen Cochrane pummeled (and broke the nose) of a Springfield Indians player for deliberately snowing Pelle Lindbergh; and it all happened so fast that the other Indians players barely had time to react. A brawl ensued.
Since the game just isn't played that way any more, an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty is appropriate. It's a real dumb penalty to take, too, and the Flyers' power play struck on a Wayne Simmonds tip-in of a Kimmo Timonen shot to give Philly a 2-1 lead.
As the game progressed, the Stars gave into frustration. Dallas is a team that feeds off emotion, which is generally a good thing but captain Brenden Morrow let his emotions get the best of him and took himself off the ice on a 10-minute misconduct. Ditto Adam Burish in his first game back in the lineup after healing a broken hand.
As far as all the yapping last night, it went on both ways all game. Dallas' Steve Ott especially thrives on stirring the pot. The mini-shoving match between Ott and Peter Laviolette at the end of the first period was really much ado about nothing.
More important to the outcome was the fact that Dallas let itself get too caught up in what was being said and what the refs were doing, while Philly channeled it into growing their lead into three goals. The Flyers took only three penalties that left them shorthanded, and killed them all. The Stars were shorthanded five times, got burned twice and lost a lot of valuable time off the clock in the process.
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Eklund and I plan to do the next Flyers Buzzcast later today. I will post details on Twitter when they are finalized. Also, Ek is getting set to make an announcement that I know will be of huge interest to Flyers fans.
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