Bob Ford: With win, Flyers bail out petulant captain

They put the captain's C right there on the jersey, and in hockey, it is actually supposed to mean something. One thing it means is that when things aren't going well, that letter becomes a bull's-eye.

The captain, more than the other players, has to answer for a team's occasional failings. He has to take more responsibility for getting his teammates ready to play, as if that small block letter could actually accomplish it.

Mike Richards, the Flyers' current captain, has had an interesting and not entirely enjoyable week, and the letter has burned him like a branding iron at times.

He got into a loud spat with the local media over an article in a national hockey magazine - not entirely sure which nation - in which he criticized the Philadelphia media for being too harsh on the team in general and him and some of the younger players in particular.

At issue was a notion that gained traction last season that some of the Flyers had finally found downtown Philadelphia after decades of quietly plying the dusty back roads of Voorhees, Camden County, and never knowing what they were missing. What they found downtown were establishments that stayed open late and interesting fans with whom to chat and - welcome to the modern world - people with cell-phone cameras and Facebook accounts and that sort of thing.

None of that matters when a team wins its games and piles success upon success. But when there are failures, the reasoning, whether founded or not, can point to what are euphemistically called "lifestyle" issues.

When the Flyers pulled a stunt as they did at the end of last season, failing to show up on the final weekend and essentially forfeiting home ice for the first round of the playoffs, that's the kind of thing that gets people talking about a lack of focus. It doesn't mean it has anything to do with off-the-ice activities, but it doesn't mean it doesn't, either.

The Flyers' organization had some of the same concerns. General manager Paul Holmgren and then-coach John Stevens spoke to the team about how to professionally handle the dual challenges of being a member of a team, and, simultaneously, being young, healthy and full of young, healthy ideas. Holmgren agreed that if he had to talk to the team about it, then it probably was an issue.

All of that had been covered pretty fairly and pretty tamely by the media that report on the team for a living, but that distinction apparently was lost on Richards, who harbored a grudge, went through a long period of not talking to the media, and then had a locker room blowup Sunday.

It was the kind of simmering situation that could have gotten a lot worse had the Flyers not opened their six-game homestand with a win last night over Columbus. The team bailed out the captain by a 5-3 score, and now we can probably return to our normal programming until the playoffs.

"I'm not going to go through it again," Richards said after the game, when he was asked about the Sunday spat and its fallout. He mumbled an answer to a second question and took a side door out of the room. If he was going to dispel the notion that he's acting petulantly, that didn't do it.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the locker room, defenseman Chris Pronger, with the perspective of both a veteran and a former captain himself, was content to enjoy the win.

"Winning cures all that ails you. When you're losing, there are always question marks, always a lot of strife sometimes and misery," he said. "When you win, that goes away pretty quickly."

The Flyers have had enough strife for one season, already, when you factor in the firing of Stevens, the various goaltender injuries, and the adjustment to new coach Peter Laviolette. They are meandering along at the bottom of the Atlantic Division and will need to scurry to make the playoffs.

At the moment, they need someone to help them settle in and pull together for the rest of the season. By default, that will probably be Pronger, even though Richards didn't lose any support in the last week.

"I don't think a lot of guys put too much stock in that," Pronger said. "Sometimes something like that can light a fire and energize you, but you can't let it fester or become a distraction in here. I think the guys laughed about it, and then we got home and moved on from there."

Starting the homestand against Columbus, now 8-16-4 on the road, didn't hurt the healing process. Keeping the momentum going will be another thing entirely.

"You need to face adversity and tough challenges and see how you're going to answer them as a group," Pronger said. "We've had a lot of ups and downs this year. There are a lot of questions about our team. And we're allowed to question one another, too, and push one another. That's why it's called a team."

Pronger sounded just like a captain when he said it. Of course, someone has to.