Rich Hofmann, Daily News Sports Columnist
Wow, were the Flyers bad on Tuesday night.
A team built on emotion showed little.
A group schooled in aggression rolled over.
Video: Can the Sixers muster a win against the Bulls? Is a Sixers or Flyers win more significant in Game 2? Should fans continue stressing over the Phillies' struggles? The Daily News' Rich Hofmann gives his thoughts.
Rich Hofmann, Daily News Sports Columnist
The Flyers won a game, just a game, just one of the four games that they will need in order to get past the New Jersey Devils in the second round of the Stanley Cup playoffs. But the way it happened should leave the Devils wondering -- because this was a great chance for them to take the series opener, and they didn't.
Think about it. The Devils had the first 11 shots of the game -- the Flyers didn't have one for almost exactly 10 minutes -- but they only had a 1-0 lead at the end of the first period. Part of that was because Ilya Bryzgalov was very good at the start. Part of it was because the Devils weren't good enough.
Then the Flyers came back. They began to take over the play in a very significant way in the second period, and they only gave it up sporadically after that. Their forecheck was relentless. Whatever rustiness they had acquired over a week-long layoff following their first-round victory over Pittsburgh was gone. If Bryzgalov hadn't allowed Petr Sykora to rifle a shot between his pads in the third period, the Flyers would have won in regulation.
Video: Will Brian Dawkins be one of the few safeties voted into the Hall of Fame? How significant is a winning record for the Sixers? The Daily News' Rich Hofmann and CineSport's Noah Coslov discuss those questions and the Phillies' struggles.
Rich Hofmann, Daily News Sports Columnist
The news, inevitable for all who wear a uniform, arrived Monday morning: Brian Dawkins is retiring.
Next stop: Canton.
Having been paid to watch this Eagles team for 3 decades now -- and if that isn't the gig of the century, I don't know what is -- there are few certainties and many conflicted feelings about different people and different events along the way. Frankly, the end here for Dawkins was one of those uncertain, conflicted things. Because, on the one hand, I understood why the team wanted to move on but, on the other hand, I wrote about how they had to find a way to get him to stay.
- Poll: Is Brian Dawkins a Hall of Famer? (3684 votes)
Rich Hofmann, Daily News Sports Columnist
And a 24-year-old shall lead them.
Claude Giroux. Yes.
On the first shift of what turned out to be the clinching game of the Flyers-Penguins series, this is what the Flyers’ best player did. He leveled Penguins captain Sidney Crosby in the first 5 seconds of the game. He scored a goal at 32 seconds. And as a kind-of-nervous Wells Fargo Center erupted in celebration, turned his own celebration into an exhortation.
Rich Hofmann, Daily News Sports Columnist
PITTSBURGH -- As it turns out, desperation wears many faces: Evgeni Malkin, searching and destroying and the consequences be damned; Kris Letang, breaking out the deep-passing game, stretching the Flyers again and again; Marc-Andre Fleury, still imperfect in goal but gradually continuing to get his feet under him; the crowd at the Consol Energy Center, stirred to a full-throated roar, chanting at one point, “BE-LIEVE...BE-LIEVE...BE-LIEVE...”
And now the Flyers hang on desperately.
What once was a 3-0 lead in the series for the Flyers is now 3-2. In what was the first normal game in an otherwise ridiculous series, the Penguins held on against a pretty relentless Flyers attack in the third period Friday night and won Game 5 by the score of 3-2.
- Poll: How will the Flyers-Penguins end? (3703 votes)
Rich Hofmann, Daily News Sports Columnist
Well, then. Maybe this is happening a little earlier than we thought, given how the first three games of the series went, but it was going to happen sometime this spring, and now it has. We have arrived at the point in the proceedings where the coach earns his money.
The Flyers’ Peter Laviolette has an exciting, young group in his dressing room -- many of them new to the team and many of them involved in their first playoff experience -- and that young group has just been knocked off of the wave it was riding and made to swallow a bucketload of seawater besides.
Penguins 10, Flyers 3.
Rich Hofmann, Daily News Sports Columnist
I have a lot of respect, and sympathy, for someone in the position currently occupied by Brendan Shanahan, the NHL’s dean of discipline. The game is fast and brutal. The stakes at this time of year are enormous. Every incident is different. And the imperatives of the sport, given the current (and overdue) emphasis on hits to the head and concussions, have changed radically in the last 18 months or so.
Like I said, I’m sympathetic -- especially given that the dangerous plays are coming in a seemingly unending wave this spring. (I will stop being sympathetic if Shanahan does not really throw the book at Phoenix’s Raffi Torres, a serial offender, after he took out Chicago’s Marian Hossa on Tuesday night. But we should know about that later.)
But here is my current dilemma: If the Penguins’ Arron Asham can get four games for cross-checking the Flyers’ Brayden Schenn to the chest and then punching a defenseless Schenn once from behind, and the Capitals’ Nicklas Backstrom can get only one game for cross-checking the Bruins’ Rich Peverly to the face, I’m just not sure anymore. Neither Asham not Backstrom had any disciplinary history with the league. Neither of their victims was injured. Peverly was kind of waving his stick around, but Backstrom’s cross check was arguably worse because it nailed Peverly in the visor. So is a single punch to the back of the head of a defenseless player the difference between four games and one game? I think everybody needs to know the answer to that question, especially the people wearing the skates and carrying the sticks.
