Rich Hofmann: Leighton standing tall in Flyers' goal

THREE SERIES, three times the question at the start of the series has been the same: How can the Flyers win when most everybody is checking the name of the other goaltender in their who-has-the-advantage matchup box?

We all know about playoffs and goaltending. We all know what the Flyers have been hearing for the better part of 15 years: that you cannot win a Stanley Cup with Burke/Biron/Vanbiesbrouck/Snow/Esche/ Niittymaki/Cechmanek in goal. Now, this spring, it has been Brian Boucher and Michael Leighton - and the check marks in the other team's column have continued to pile up (this time in favor of Montreal's Jaroslav Halak).

"You look at our first round, we played Martin Brodeur," Leighton was saying last night. "So who would you check, him or Boucher? Boosh came off playing great, but he's the best goalie in the world. We beat them, we go in against [Boston's] Tuukka Rask, who had a great first round. So it's a very similar situation.

"Halak has been their star for the first two rounds here, but we're not changing anything. We want to do the same thing we did to Rask: Get in front of him, put pucks at him and make his life miserable. That's what we did tonight and we were successful."

The Flyers got four goals against Halak and six in the game, a 6-0 victory that nobody saw coming. Leighton ended up with the shutout in his third start since replacing Boucher, who tore up both knees in the middle of a Game 5 shutout against Boston.

Leighton has played about 210 minutes this postseason and about 200 of those minutes have been pristine. The only hiccup came at the start of Game 7 against Boston - admittedly, not the best time for a hiccup - but he calmed down and then his team went to work in front of him, and we all saw the history that was made.

This night was not nearly as tense. It felt odd, frankly, after the hyperintensity of the last series.

"It makes it a little bit easier when we score that many goals," Leighton said. "The second period, we played really well, came out flying in the second, got a few goals - and that kind of calmed me down and I think it calmed the team down and took a lot of pressure off us right off the bat."

Leighton stopped 28 shots, a pretty high number for a one-sided game. Thirteen of them came in a first period that was deceptive. The Flyers had a 1-0 lead at the end of the period, the Canadiens had a 13-6 advantage in shots, and the truth about the overall play was somewhere in between those numbers.

No one would have been shocked if the Flyers had suffered a letdown last night, Leighton included. But he was good early and the same, familiar dynamic took hold - the team fed off him.

"They had a couple of good chances in the first period," Leighton said. "I was seeing a lot of the pucks. They don't have a big presence like Boston in front of the net. So I was looking over some of the guys and getting to see the pucks, and we were still blocking shots. I just had to make the saves I should make in the first, and we kind of took over from there."

After every game, Leighton has made some reference to being nervous at the start of games and then finding a way to settle in.

Is it getting any easier?

"Definitely," he said. "It's just taken me a few games to get into it. Tonight, I think I was more excited just to get the series going. Obviously, we had a big high coming off that win in Boston. But we knew this was a big game for us. We didn't want to go down 1-0 at home."

He is, like Boucher before him, noticeably less frantic when he is playing well - calm, square to the shooter, all of that. Rebounds have not been much of an issue, and they really weren't last night.

"That's something I've worked on all year," Leighton said. "[Goaltender coach] Jeff Reese, right when I got here, he kind of changed my game a little bit. That's pretty much what it fits to be: I want to make the first save and be in position to make the second save and possibly a third save instead of being out of position and a wide-open net. That's something we've been working on and I've just been getting more comfortable as the games go on here."

It goes without saying that it shows.

Send e-mail to hofmanr@phillynews.com,

or read his blog, The Idle Rich, at

http://go.philly.com/theidlerich. For recent columns go to http://go.philly.com/hofmann.