Sam Donnellon: Playoff success is icing on cake for Flyers

But the cake stories really take the cake.

Before the Phantoms' 2005 run to the Calder Cup, Stevens held a team meeting at his Washington Township, N.J., home and instructed each player to bring an ingredient. Eggs, flour, sugar, frosting - they were going to bake a team cake.

The idea, as Stevens said the other day, "is that all the ingredients by themselves aren't that appealing. But when you mix them with some fire you come up with a better product in the end. That's kind of who you are."

Hokey? You bet, even for an AHL team. And when he threw the cake into this year's playoff run, it wasn't hard to imagine the faces he might have received from some of those Lindros-era Flyers, or even the ones who mutinied against Bill Barber.

With the NHL's hottest team, Washington, as their first-round foe, it wasn't hard to imagine the second-year coach with egg on his face, too.

But these Flyers not only put up with it, they embraced the concept. On the train ride after winning Game 7 in Washington, the players even challenged Stevens to produce another cake in the short window between the two rounds, unaware their coach had already worked that out.

"I had to jump through hoops to get it," he said. "At 10 o'clock, that night. Because you can't get it ahead of time or it's bad luck."

To call John Stevens a player's coach is to minimalize him. Yeah, he doesn't rip into players the way his predecessor did, and yeah, there have been times this season where everyone, including the team owner and the general manager, implied that he should. That he didn't and they are here, says that he knew what he was doing, or at least that he could take the heat. But Stevens' cool is only a part of why the Flyers have advanced to the Eastern Conference finals against the Penguins.

The other part is that he can just flat-out coach.

"The one thing that really sticks out when you talk about John is the ability to see everything as it is happening," assistant coach Joe Mullen said after practice yesterday. "He knows when he has to adjust things, and he makes those adjustments really quick.

"It's amazing. He sees one thing on a film and he picks it out right like that. He can see the film just one time and say, 'Oh, look at that. Go back, go back.' . . . Lots of coaches, it takes four or five times . . . some don't ever see it. Sometimes I go down between periods to tell them things and they're like, 'We already know that.' "

Stevens studied the game as a player, studied it in his six seasons of coaching in the AHL. He is comfortable in his own skin, comfortable answering even the most antagonistic questions. He is open to new ways of doing things. He introduced R.J. Umberger to the Dore program that has improved his spatial awareness and led to success in these playoffs. He uses video to break down everything.

None of that explains how quickly he sees things developing. That's innate. People like to say hockey is a simple game, but when Stevens talks, you realize how much is in the details. He will praise a defenseman for his quickness in closing on a foe. In the series against Washington, he used their obsession with puck possession to his team's advantage, devising a strategy that pushed everything to the outside. I'll take the middle of the ice. You can have everything else. Cough it up, and we're headed the other way.

It worked against Montreal, too. It's the formula that has taken them this far, the formula that wins this time of the year, provided the goalie cooperates. If Stevens was harsh on a player at times this season, it was Martin Biron. But it was always analytical, never emotional, and never personal. And Biron, to his credit, took it with grace, and perhaps became better from it.

"I've been criticized for being calm and have been actually complimented for being calm," Stevens said the other day, a grin on his face. "I am who I am. There's a deep fire burning inside. It's pretty exciting when we do have success as a group. To me that's the greatest thing about hockey is being able to have success with the group."

That cake thing again. There are no secret ingredients to this team, no hard-to-find ones, either. Umberger leads this team in playoff goals. Randy Jones has one of the best playoff plus-minuses. Just this season there was talk of trading either or both, but that was before the chef started cooking, before all the ingredients started to look like an unexpected treat, a dessert that already smells a whole lot better than when it first went into the oven. *

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