Players-only meeting after another Flyers loss

THE BUZZER sounded and the Flyers shuffled off the ice.

After Jaromir Jagr willed his way to an empty-net goal, most of the thousand or so fans remaining in the Wells Fargo Center who didn't boo the Flyers' 3-0 loss to New Jersey just sat there. Their eyes had glazed over by that point.

After all 20 players were accounted for, the doors to the Flyers' locker room shut. And stayed shut.

A 10-minute, players-only meeting ensued. Craig Berube was not present. General manager Paul Holmgren, who already addressed the team during an intermission last week, did not participate. An unhappy Ed Snider loomed just outside, near the door of the Flyers' training room, but did not speak. What more could possibly be said?

Inside, after placing their white helmets above their stalls, the mood was different than one might expect for a team that has been outscored by 13-0 in their home building over nearly their last three full games (163:26).

There were no sticks thrown. No player peeled the paint off the dressing room wall with a powerful, infuriated blast.

"It wasn't heated," said one Flyer who requested anonymity. "It was probably more disappointment than anything. The one thing that kept being said was that we've got to stay together when it gets like this. We can't fall apart.

"The big theme was that we've got to climb out of this together."

The player who likely called the impromptu meeting, captain Claude Giroux, was so frustrated by the loss that he was dressed and out of the building in his suit and tie minutes after the meeting ended. At one point during the second period, he smashed his stick on the boards and didn't bother to retrieve it, skating off in frustration.

Giroux led the Flyers in ice time (23:36), co-led in hits (five) and was excellent in the faceoff circle (69 percent). But he is still searching for his first goal, much in the same way the Flyers are searching for any sort of identity.

"We talked about a lot of stuff," Wayne Simmonds said. "Not really anything I'm going to share with [the public], but we talked about a lot of things. We know what we did wrong and we're trying to address what we did wrong."

Each subsequent loss seems like a new low-water mark - as if last Friday's 7-0 drubbing from Washington wasn't enough of a wake-up call. Not being able to hang onto the lead in Tuesday's last-minute loss seemed to sting more than any this season . . . until last night, when tough guy Cam Janssen scored the game-winner on his fourth career goal, which was actually scored by Andrej Meszaros.

Fans on social media dubbed it the Meszaros "hat trick," since he'd been drilled so hard by Janssen earlier in the shift that he lost his stick and mouthguard before deflecting Janssen's shot behind Ray Emery.

"We talked about some things," Hal Gill said. "We want to stick together. We can't sit there and pout. No one out there really cares about it, but we in the locker room, we care. We have to find a way to turn it around."

Last night, though, there was no staged fight to try to shake the Flyers out of their funk. They already tried that; the Flyers are 1-1-1 and have been outscored 5-2 since then. And last night wasn't the first "players only" meeting of the season - they had one last week after practice.

For his part, Berube said he still has a lot of coaching to do, even though his players seem to make the same mistakes repeatedly. Berube mentioned how the Flyers' power play, with an extra man, was outworked by the Devils. The Flyers watched a clinic in puck possession by 41-year-old Jagr, who skated circles around them and dominated play.

"I think they can be good," Berube said of meetings called by players. "I think they can recognize what they have to do better as a team and guys can talk about things.

"It's not a hard game. It's the competitiveness and a will to win and doing all the little things right to win, and right now we're not good enough, we're not doing good enough. That's the bottom line."

For the 14th time in 15 games this season, the Flyers entered the third period within one goal of tying or winning the game. They lost for the 10th time. Something needs to change, and it can't just be through words anymore.

"It was good that we talked," Meszaros said. "We've got to straighten some things out. We've talked about it. We have to move forward. We have a lot of games left to turn this thing around."

The Flyers' penalty kill is a perfect 12-for-12 in their last three games . . . Defenseman Luke Schenn was a healthy scratch for the third straight game . . . Kris Newbury, recalled from AHL Adirondack on Wednesday, was inserted in the lineup in place of Jay Rosehill . . . Speaking of Adirondack, the owners of the AHL's Portland Pirates visited Glens Falls (N.Y.) Civic Center, current home of the Phantoms, as a possible tenant for next season. The Phantoms are moving to their new home in Allentown in October.

Blog: ph.ly/FrequentFlyers