Flyers, please start the playoffs

IT WAS ANOTHER one of those games, and another one of those awkward postgames, and Flyers captain Mike Richards stood there and muttered under his breath, "Same questions."

It is that time of year, when everybody is tired of looking at each other and everybody is tired of waiting for the stuff that really matters.

Hurry, playoffs.

The Flyers are a good team. You know it, they know it, everybody in the National Hockey League knows it.

The real scorekeeping begins in the second week of April. You know it, they know it, et cetera.

In the meantime, we are all in this uncomfortable middle ground. The Flyers are trying to generate some momentum going into the playoffs but cannot seem to sustain anything for very long; Bruins 2, Flyers 1, case in point. The media are wondering why.

The players are unable to say what everybody knows in their hearts - that is, that they have been in first place in the NHL Eastern Conference for nearly 3 months, and that it is difficult to manufacture urgency at a time when staying healthy is really the most important thing for a hockey player whose playoff berth is already clinched. So we go through this dance, picking at scabs and covering them with platitudes - everybody involved knowing that none of it is likely to matter on April 13, when the playoffs begin.

This is going to play out in one of two ways. If the Flyers find a way to get bounced out of the first round of the playoffs, everybody will point to their lack of consistency down the stretch. If the Flyers find a way to make another long run this spring, everybody will acknowledge this was a 100-something-point team whose mediocre last couple of weeks were forgotten the moment that the urgency was ratcheted up.

Hindsight will be unimpeachable, as is the custom. In the meantime, though, the Flyers have to get from now to then.

In the last week, they played a good game but lost in a shootout against Washington on a night when starting goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky was marked absent, and then they played a bad game against Pittsburgh and lost in another shootout, and then they tap-danced on the New York Islanders, and then they lost last night when the Bruins scored a late power-play goal.

None of it has been horrible, even as this is now nine games without defenseman Chris Pronger and his broken hand. It has just been kind of . . . blah. (That's a hockey term.)

"The [Bruins] were just right there and we didn't find ways to win," Richards said. "It is just little things that we need to correct and keep the foot on the gas. Consistency is something we have been good with all year but we are being inconsistent within the game."

You notice it mostly in the offensive end. The Flyers go through long stretches when they don't seem to generate a whole heck of a lot. Theirs is a physical, imperative kind of style of offense when it is working best, and the Flyers don't seem all that interested right now in playing that way. The result is this extended series of doldrums.

"Yeah, and . . . when we start turning pucks over is when we don't get those scoring chances," Richards said.

The turnovers mean they spend too much time in their own end, stressing the defensemen. The defense has played well in Pronger's absence, but they are spending a lot of time in front of their goaltenders, and their goaltenders have seen 104 shots in the last three games, which is high.

We all know what the Flyers look like when they're playing well. The Bobrovsky fiasco against Washington masked it, but that was the game they need to play to be a winning team. Everybody knows they have the ability to do it. They just . . . haven't.

Richards says some of it is physical, some of it is mental, and all of it is correctable. He is right about the first two parts and we will find out soon enough about the third part.

If they fall out of first place in the conference - their lead is down to two points over both Washington and Pittsburgh, but the Flyers have played one fewer game - skeptics will understandably sprout. But it will all just be conversation, however it turns out.

Hurry, playoffs.

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