Flyers take long look at what went wrong in Game 1 against Bruins

Sunday morning service for the Flyers took place in a video room at their practice facility, where they were provided with visual evidence of how terribly they played in Saturday's 7-3 loss to Boston in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference semifinals.

The sermon was delivered by a stern Peter Laviolette and it touched on the following topics - brain cramps, embarrassment, lackadaisical effort. Laviolette didn't make the Flyers do penance by making them sweat and strain through a demanding practice. Instead, he allowed them to stew in their own shame, counting on the notion that perhaps humiliation will serve as the key motivator for Monday's Game 2 at the Wells Fargo Center.

"It wasn't a lot of fun," Danny Briere said of the video session. "You realize how bad we played, how many mistakes we made, how many brain cramps we had. There are a lot of things we need to rectify.

"Sometimes we talk about an eye opener. You realize the effort needs to be at its highest. You can't afford to take it easy and hope you'll still be in the game. What I'm hoping is everybody had their worst game at the same time and we can move on and play better. It was brain cramps, making the wrong decisions."

After watching the Bruins outplay the Flyers in every aspect of the game, Scott Hartnell said: "It's pretty simple when you watch video and see the mistakes, the brain cramps that we had. Obviously we weren't that competitive. There are a lot of things we have to change.

"I think we embarrassed ourselves in front of our fans on our home ice," he added. "We have a lot of pride, so you want to come back for the next game all fired up. I know the group of guys we have in here will definitely be fired up and ready to go."

How the Flyers made such a dramatic slide from the brisk, dominating performance in Game 7 against Buffalo to such a sloppy and uninspired performance in the series opener against the Bruins may be unexplainable. But what's done is done, and they seemed well aware that they can't afford to again tempt fate, as they did last year when they rubbed out a three-games-to-none deficit to beat the Bruins in seven games. These are not the same Bruins. Nearly half the Bruins who dressed for the opener didn't play in last year's series, and there's a significant upgrade in goal with Tim Thomas.

"They outhit us, they out faceoff-ed us, they did everything better than we did," Hartnell said. "I know it's going to be a more physical game. It has to be because that's when we're effective. We have to hit their [defensemen]. I don't know if we were afraid to hit [Zdeno] Chara and [Johnny] Boychuk and those guys, but definitely [Monday] will be different."

Brian Boucher is expected to be back in goal for the Flyers, although Laviolette declined to make it official. In the ongoing revolving door in front of the Flyers' net, Boucher was pulled for Sergei Bobrovsky after Boston's lead reached 5-1 with 2 minutes, 46 seconds left in the second period. It was the fourth time in eight playoff games that Laviolette changed goalies. They won two of them, both times when Boucher was the one who came off the bench.

Boucher suggested the goalie-go-round has run its course, and spoke as if he'll be the starter.

"I think there are only so many times you can make a change before you run out of nine lives, I guess," he said. "You start to wonder how many times you can make a change. Like [in Game 1], we made a goalie change and if it had held true to form we would have come back and won that game, but it obviously didn't go that way. That's what I mean. Sometimes it isn't going to make a difference. We don't want it to come to that situation. We just want to roll along and have a good start and have good games as we go forward."

If the Flyers are going to even the series before it moves to Boston for Games 3 and 4 Wednesday and Friday, they must follow a simple formula: Take away the time and space they allowed the Bruins, who repeatedly broke behind the Flyers' defense and were left unhindered to poke rebounds past Boucher.

"Listen, nobody feels good about what happened and because you didn't do what you wanted to do in Game 1 is not an indication you won't in Game 2," Laviolette said. "Each game in a series is a chapter of its own and [Game 1] was not a good chapter for us."