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Sielski: Read rejuvenating career with quick start

Matt Read wasn't 24 hours removed from surgery on his right thumb, and already his general manager was delivering a demand. This was mid-June, the Flyers nearly two months into their summer vacation, and Ron Hextall was making it perfectly clear to Read:

Matt Read wasn't 24 hours removed from surgery on his right thumb, and already his general manager was delivering a demand. This was mid-June, the Flyers nearly two months into their summer vacation, and Ron Hextall was making it perfectly clear to Read: Maybe the soreness in his thumb last season and a nagging ankle problem in 2014-15 were the direct cause of the decline in a once-promising player's production. Maybe those injuries had limited him to 19 goals over 169 regular-season games. Maybe they were a legitimate excuse. But they weren't anymore.

"We need more," Hextall told reporters then.

Four months later, Read seems a new man, or perhaps just closer to the one he used to be. His second-period goal Thursday night, which gave the Flyers a brief lead in their 3-2 loss to the Anaheim Ducks, was his fourth in four games this season, and it was a marvelous play, a confident play.

He had accepted a little one-handed flick pass from Pierre-Eduoard Bellemare along the left wing, surged past Ducks defenseman Sam Vatanen, cut across the front of the net, and tucked the puck behind goaltender John Gibson. It was the best moment in another rough night for the Flyers, in their third consecutive loss, in a game in which they had seven power plays and squandered six of them. And out of nowhere, out of the excitement over the debuts of rookies Travis Konecny and Ivan Provorov, the Flyers' best player so far has been a guy who had been buried on the fourth line to begin this season.

Read had scored 24 goals as a rookie in 2011-12, then 22 two seasons later, then signed a four-year, $14.5-million contract in 2014, then saw his game slowly deteriorate. He remained a solid defensive forward, but he had become too passive on offense, too content to remain on the outside of the action, as if he watching from behind a window.

He said after Tuesday's game that he had not heard what Hextall had said about him in June. But then, he didn't need to.

"I know for myself, from the last two years, that I've got to be better," he said. "Even going into last year, I knew I had to be better, and I did as much as I could in the offseason to have a good season. I guess it didn't go my way, and the course of the season took its toll. But I tried to show up in the best shape I could and just make it easier on my linemates and myself by playing a simpler game. It's going well so far."

Since the surgery, in which doctors removed a bone spur from his thumb, Read has carried out daily exercises with stress balls and a hand machine to strengthen his wrist. Throughout the summer, he joined five teammates on Tuesday and Thursday mornings for 40 minutes worth of grueling skating drills - no sticks, no pucks, just workouts in which they raced each other up, down, and around the rink. Read concentrated specifically, he said, on maintaining his edge as he made turns, hoping that, even at age 30, he could be stronger and more confident on his skates. Look at his goal Thursday night. He'd have to be to make that kind of move around a defenseman and across a goalie's face and still retain control of the puck.

"I don't know the stat," he said, "but it's near 90 percent of all goals come within 10 feet of the net. If you want to score goals, you've got to get in that area. I think that's something, the last two years, that kind of faded away for me. I was a perimeter player. It's easy to be a perimeter player if you making plays and stuff like that, but to score goals, you've got to get in those tough areas and have tenacity around the net and battle for those loose pucks."

With Konecny's arrival and insertion into the lineup on the second line, it was easy to consider Read a spare part on a team that was starting to turn a page. He is just 5-foot-10 and 185 pounds, the same smallish build of Konecny and Giroux. But of those two, the former was a fresh new kid, a first-round pick the previous year, and the latter was the captain, and after those two subpar seasons, Read had to prove he was something more than a remnant from those mediocre Flyers teams that were pushed around too often.

"He has absolutely worked his tail off," Hextall said. "He understood he hasn't been as good a player as he probably should have been last year. He understood it. He took it upon himself, put in a great summer, came in early, got himself in great shape. And he's a hungry hockey player right now. To me, he's been back to where he was, and when Matt Read's playing the way he can play, he's a hell of a player."

He's playing that way now. Once, the Flyers needed more from him, and everyone knew it, Matt Read most of all. At the moment, that demand applies only to everyone else.

msielski@phillynews.com

@MikeSielski