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Winless Flyers search for positives

The Flyers played good hockey against a good team Tuesday night at the Wells Fargo Center, and the best thing they could say afterward was that at least it was not good for nothing.

Flyers head coach Craig Berube. (Yong Kim/Staff Photographer)
Flyers head coach Craig Berube. (Yong Kim/Staff Photographer)Read more

The Flyers played good hockey against a good team Tuesday night at the Wells Fargo Center, and the best thing they could say afterward was that at least it was not good for nothing.

They were still winless after four games and far from pleased with their 4-3 shootout loss to the Anaheim Ducks, but when you're off to a slow start for the second straight season you look for progress any place you can find it.

And, after an inexplicable third-period collapse against Montreal over the weekend, this definitely represented movement in a positive direction even if it was also another reminder that the Flyers are in trouble whenever a hockey game is decided by that silly little thing called a shootout.

"Not a good feeling, obviously," Flyers coach Craig Berube said after his team slipped to 0-2-2. "We lost the game."

This was an anniversary of sorts for Berube. He moved from an assistant's job to the head coaching role a year ago in the fourth game of the season after the Flyers started 0-3 and managed a total of three goals under Peter Laviolette. If nothing else, new general manager Ron Hextall is showing an infinite amount of patience compared to some of his predecessors.

The Flyers won in Berube's NHL head coaching debut last season but lost four more in a row after that. The 1-7 start was the worst in franchise history. To his credit, Berube got the team turned around, and the Flyers made good on captain Claude Giroux's early-season promise that they would rebound and make the playoffs.

The coach believes this bad start is better than that bad start, and he's right. But "We don't stink at the start nearly as bad this year as we did last year," is probably not an explanation you want to give Flyers fans.

"I look at these first three games, and we could have come out of there with points," Berube said before the game.

Instead, they emerged from the first three with a point, and the game in which they earned it against Montreal might have been the most disturbing of them all. The Flyers blew a three-goal lead in the third period to the Canadiens and reaffirmed that to them the term "shootout" means "Shoot, we're out of it."

"We are making some mental mistakes at times where we can't, so we have to start cleaning up that part of it," Berube said before the game. "Like I said, we could be sitting here not talking about this, but we are. So we deal with the adversity, and we go forward. We'll go out [Tuesday night] and see what happens."

What happened was the Flyers got beaten by a better team even though they played a better overall game. After the 3-1 Ducks built a 2-0 lead in the opening period, the Flyers played 20 of their best minutes this season in the second to draw even on power-play goals by Mark Streit and the white-hot Wayne Simmonds. The Flyers had an 18-6 shot advantage in the second period, but even that spurt of outstanding hockey ended badly for them.

Simmonds' goal tied the score with 2 minutes, 25 seconds left in the second, but with just 16.8 seconds left, the Ducks' best two offensive players - Ryan Getzlaf and Corey Perry - set up Matt Beleskey right in front of the Flyers' net. Goalie Steve Mason never had a chance, and the Ducks reclaimed the lead at 3-2. It was more of a physical mistake - defenseman Nick Schultz collided with center Sean Couturier - than a mental one that led to the goal.

The Flyers followed up their strong second period with an equally solid third and were rewarded for their hard work with a game-tying goal by Jake Voracek with 5:20 remaining in regulation. Voracek entered Tuesday without a goal or a point after putting together the best season of his career a year ago.

With time ticking down, he made a great individual play by skating deep into the Ducks' end before trying to tuck a wrap-around shot past goalie Frederik Andersen. The shot ricocheted out to defenseman Michael Del Zotto, who fed it back to Voracek down low. The winger went in front and slid a backhand shot into the net.

And then the game went to a shootout, an eight-letter word that usually leaves the Flyers muttering four-letter ones.

"You tie it up, and then 16 seconds before the end of the period to get another goal against us, a lot of teams probably would have gone down, but we didn't quit," Streit said. "We kept our calm and kept playing, and it paid off."

Only in the form of a single point, but that was progress for a Flyers team that is once again slow getting out of the gate.