Hakstol's steady approach working with Flyers
DAVE HAKSTOL will reach the halfway point of his first season as Flyers coach Wednesday night and this is what we know about him.
DAVE HAKSTOL will reach the halfway point of his first season as Flyers coach Wednesday night and this is what we know about him.
His face is locked into the same position whether his team is protecting a two-goal lead or trying to overcome a two-goal deficit, or whether he is shopping for groceries with his family on a rare day off recently.
Neither affable nor antagonistic. Neither emotional or indifferent.
Steady. Consistent. And yeah, a bit didactic.
"There's no frustration coming out of him,'' Flyers captain Claude Giroux was saying after practice Tuesday at Skate Zone. "We'll have a bad game and it's about a process. It's about learning. It's about making it a habit to play the same way every night.''
A habit. Spot on. Bad habits are hard to break. Good habits are hard to create, even harder to keep. Peter Laviolette's Flyers were often an electric and erratic bunch, scoring spectacular goals at times, surrendering leads in gulps via mind-numbing breakdowns during others.
Craig Berube's attempts to get them to play more responsibly was an uneven process at best, ending with an incredibly fragile group that struggled to overcome even one-goal deficits, and surrendered late leads . . . well, almost habitually.
Hakstol's attempt to change this has been very, well, collegiate. That's not a knock, quite the opposite. Giroux even lauded him Tuesday as "a great teacher." But even great teachers need time, especially when significant un-learning is involved. Hakstol introduced a different forecheck, a different neutral-zone strategy too. The early result, said Jake Voracek, was "playing the game too much in your head, and not on the ice."
"Obviously you're going to have the mistakes happen again and again. But you've got to eliminate them as much as possible. And find a way to execute that system as soon as possible. And I think that's what we're doing right now. We're playing well and we're skating in games. Sometimes in the beginning of the season we didn't.''
"I think that's inherent with a change,'' Hakstol said. "Are we doing things more naturally now than we were at Game 1? Absolutely. I think that's going to happen in any season. And certainly when there's a change.''
Don't underestimate the power of that poker face in the process. Unlike his recent predecessors, Hakstol isn't likely to get into it with another coach or referee, or even get in the grill of a player he believes to be underperforming.
"During the game he doesn't say as much as after the game,'' Giroux said. "He lets us play, let's us do our thing. And then every day we come to the rink we get better. We always touch up on something, and it's a process. And slowly, it's creeping into our game to be responsible, to play the right way.''
Statistically, the Flyers are only incrementally better than last year's team was at the season's midpoint. Their current 18-15-7 record is a swing of three games, and may be the best statistical indicator of what Shayne Gostisbehere - and his three overtime winners - has meant to this team since his full-time promotion in mid-November.
What is not identical is the vibe. Or to steal Jeffrey Lurie's favorite word, the trajectory. The Flyers have recorded points in 13 of the 18 games they have played since Nov. 27, have gone from a team that could occasionally surprise an elite team to one that requires its full attention to beat. And while they still rank just 29th of 30 teams in goals scored, they have become a tougher team to score against, ranking in the middle in goals-against.
Entering Wednesday's home game against the Bruins, they have fashioned a modest three-game winning streak despite a 1-for-10 slump on the power play, despite an injury that has sidelined Gostisbehere, despite their captain hacky-sacking his way through a scoring drought in which he has scored just once in his last 11 games.
But Giroux is winning faceoffs, blocking shots and killing penalties and, Tuesday, celebrated his 28th birthday by escorting a French-speaking camera crew around Skate Zone and answering questions about his lack of scoring with jokes and smiles.
His team is winning games without his points, with an increasingly consistent effort that has them smack in the middle of a playoff hunt, an effort that sure seems to trace back to a coach who may be hard to read, but not to play for.
"We're in a spot right now where we have to keep pushing to put us into that position,'' Hakstol said. "I will say this: I think the mood inside the room is we believe in ourselves and in what we're doing. That doesn't make the path any easier. But we're going to keep at it.''
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