Sam Donnellon: Flyers captain Richards becoming wiser than his years

Year 3 begins.

There is hope.

There is unease.

There is impatience.

Their future clearly is right now.

"There's pressure there with the team we have on paper," 24-year-old Flyers captain Mike Richards said after a spirited practice in Voorhees, N.J., yesterday. "Pressure to perform. Everybody around us has those expectations. You feel it.

"What we're going to do with those is still to see."

So begins the latest chapter of Flyers hockey, the latest effort to reconnect to the consecutive championship seasons of the mid-1970s, the way the Phillies last October finally bridged to 1980. Great players have come and gone, but the pattern of early promise morphing into lingering doubt has marked this franchise like a witch's wart, and as the team plays its first preseason game at Detroit tonight, we approach that precipice again.

Is this a team on the brink of a Stanley Cup?

Or have we overvalued its core, its resolve, its essence? Again?

"It's a tough question to answer," Richards said. "I don't know what to say. I know the expectations are there. We have the same kind of mind-set . . . It's not like

we're not thinking the same thing that everybody else is thinking."

The Flyers' offseason moves addressed several perceived flaws. In Chris Pronger, the defense gained a nasty edge woefully missing with the departure of Jason Smith and the end of Derian Hatcher's career. Ray Emery is supposed to give the Flyers a feistiness in the net that cerebral Martin Biron was deemed lacking. Ian Laperriere was added, too, for toughness.

But it all traces back to the team's two young centerpiece players, Jeff Carter and Richards. Carter emerged as a bona fide NHL superstar last year, and was the team's most exciting player. Given the captaincy over such experienced veterans as Kimmo Timonen before last season, Richards struggled at times, both on the ice and with at least some facets of his role. As the team lost games late, and with them home ice, his what-me-worry comments to the media met with considerable criticism in some quarters - most notably those of the general manager, Paul Holmgren.

Did Richards get the job too soon?

"I think anybody who becomes captain goes through a learning curve," Flyers coach John Stevens said. "It doesn't matter who we're talking about. But there's no question in my mind we made the right choice."

Richards was asked at one point yesterday whether he would change his approach this season. He said, "I'm not going to change anything," but immediately followed that with this:

"There might be situations I might handle differently. We'll see when they come about."

Someone asked him about the young guys in camp, what he saw in them, "as a veteran." Richards smiled at the thought, and at how quickly his stature with the team had changed. One Mississippi, two Mississippi . . .

"When you're younger, you're just kind of coming in here trying to impress people," he said. "As a captain, you have different things to worry about, you have different things to prove, you have different thoughts going through your mind in different situations. So there's definitely a lot more that runs through your head than what you're used to."

He's used to it now. He also has more help in Pronger, a seasoned captain. The young team is older now, too, humbled and, they hope, wiser after their listless last season and more self-motivated and self-disciplined.

"I think it was a lesson learned for us last year," Stevens said. "I think that lesson [was], we came in feeling pretty good about ourselves, maybe didn't pay enough attention to the details and to defensive play like we needed to.

"I think that lesson is etched in our minds. We didn't start well and we didn't finish well."

Year 3 begins now.

"It's been a long summer," Richards said. "I've had a lot of time off. Had a lot of time to think." *

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