Sielski: For Flyers' sake and his, Steve Mason needs to sort himself out

Steve Mason's psyche has long been treacherous territory, the cause of the questions that always seem to arise whenever he comes close to solidifying himself as the Flyers' franchise goaltender, and here was one more example late Thursday night.

Coach Dave Hakstol had replaced Mason with Michal Neuvirth after the second period of the Flyers' 5-4 win over the Canucks. It was hardly a surprising decision, born of Mason's surrendering a soft stuff-in goal by Markus Grandlund and Hakstol's desire to inspire his team to play better collective defense. Hakstol reaffirmed as much afterward, going out of his way to bury the idea that he had lost any confidence in Mason and that Mason should lose any confidence in himself.

"He's played some pretty good hockey for us, and it's a real fine difference through a 60-minute hockey game for a goaltender coming out with an absolute clean performance or not," Hakstol said. "For my take, from what I've seen in practices and games, maybe he's not at his very best, but I don't think he's far off. Mase will be fine. . . .

"I think he's had a good year to this point and time. Every player has their ups and downs, as well as our team has certainly had its ups and downs. But I think he's had a good year."

Yet Mason himself seemed in no mood to be soothed. The Flyers had played 28 games over the previous 58 days, roughly one game every 48 hours, and Mason had started 25 of them. The workload had robbed him of valuable practice time, he said, to iron out some bad habits that had crept into his play - his save percentage this season falling to .901, his lowest mark in five years.

"When you get the practice time, you have everything you can work on," he said. "Right now, we haven't had full practices. I can't remember the last time we had consecutive practices that allowed us to work on things. So it's been tough to have that time. Just got to be better."

The easy blame-game argument here would be that the Flyers should have given Mason more time to rest, that they should have started Anthony Stolarz more frequently and afforded themselves the added benefit of learning more about a young, promising goaltender. There's plenty of merit to that position, but there's something nagging here, too, about Mason's lamentations over his workload. He has always wanted to be the guy, always thrived most when neither Neuvirth nor anyone else has posed a serious challenge to him as the Flyers' No. 1 goalie. Now he'd had his chance for two full months, and he was admitting that it had left him drained and discombobulated, and it was hard to interpret Hakstol's public support as anything other than a coach's attempt to comfort an anxious goalie.

This is nothing new for Mason: Just when a team might feel safe committing to him, something seems to shake him at his core. Following his Calder Trophy-winning rookie season in 2008-09, for instance, his immaturity and subsequent regression in net allowed the Flyers to acquire him from the Columbus Blue Jackets in 2013. "The combination of expectations and sense of entitlement, like we talked about, was a big cause of the struggles," Dave Rook, his goaltending coach in Columbus, said in a 2014 interview. "From an athlete point of view, it was pretty bad."

The Flyers - Jeff Reese, their goalie coach at the time, in particular - took the time and care to restore Mason's confidence, and he was their best player both in a 2014 playoff series against the Rangers and throughout the 2014-15 season. You think of those stretches - the two victories he stole from the Rangers, his .928 save percentage in '14-15, his fine play during the Flyers' recent 10-game winning streak - and you forget why there are any questions at all.

But there has been enough to make you wonder. That terrific postseason performance in 2014 felt deep in the past last spring, when Mason allowed that 101-foot shot from center ice to slither through his legs in Game 2 against the Capitals, when Washington torched him for six goals in Game 3, when Hakstol and general manager Ron Hextall sat him down and Neuvirth stretched the series to six with a spectacular three-game stretch. Now Neuvirth is healthy again, and if the burden of bearing up behind the Flyers' oft-careless defense wore Mason down, Neuvirth will be all too happy to step in and take his chances.

In a way, this stretch drive will be much more consequential for Mason - like Neuvirth a free agent at season's end - than it will for the Flyers. From Stolarz to Alex Lyon, from Carter Hart to Merrick Madsen, from Felix Sandstrom to Ivan Fedotov, the Flyers have goalies galore in their system. It wouldn't take much for them to re-sign Neuvirth as a veteran mentor and elevate one of these prospects.

Mason is just 28, in what ought to be the prime of his career. There's still time for him to rewrite that scenario, to persuade the Flyers that he can be part of their future. There's still time for Steve Mason to do the thing that always seems so difficult for him: ease his mind, and everyone else's.

msielski@phillynews.com

@MikeSielski