Flyers fall in dramatic fashion to Hurricanes by 6-4 final score

RALEIGH — The Philadelphia Flyers headed into Raleigh knowing that they would need a herculean effort to take down a Carolina Hurricanes club that had won six straight and largely dominated opponents in the process.

They came up just short.

Martin Necas’s gamewinning goal with 29.3 seconds remaining gave Carolina their final lead of the night, en route to a 6-4 victory. Travis Konecny led the way for the Flyers, finishing with two goals and two assists, including a dramatic game-tying tally midway through the third period off a high-effort forecheck. But Konecny’s heroics were not enough, as Carolina nabbed their seventh consecutive win.

Opportunity for narrative-changing win missed

With time running down in the third period, the door was wide open for the Flyers to deliver the kind of statement upset victory that could serve as a springboard into the rest of November. They were scoring goals. They were hanging right with a red-hot, top-tier Eastern Conference foe.

Instead, it became a night that John Tortorella believed warranted just nine words in his postgame presser.

Yes, it was a frustrated Tortorella who stood in front of the media after his team’s 6-4 loss to the Hurricanes, and for good reason. They had come within 29.3 seconds of nabbing at least a point and exiting Raleigh with at minimum, something of a moral victory. Instead, the focus will be on the team’s continued issues — namely, just six shots on goal over the final 40 minutes of play.

“We’re trying our best,” Travis Konecny said. “I thought we played a pretty good game.”

And perhaps with the benefit of time and further tape study, Tortorella will agree. After all, the Flyers did erase deficits of 3-1 and 4-3 in the second half of the game, and there were even old shades of their dangerous 2023-24 transition game in the middle stanza. The Flyers had jump. They were competitive. And they forced a now 9-2-0 Hurricanes club to play a full 60-minute game to defeat them.

But in the end, the Flyers still lost in regulation, and were still outshot 34 – 16 in the process. Even accounting for the quality of competition, that’s not going to cut it, and didn’t qualify as the kind of progress that Tortorella wanted to see out of his club.

“No,” Tortorella tersely answered when asked as much after the game.

Surely the players got that same message from their coach behind closed doors as well.

Kolosov holds own with Ersson out

The hope in Philadelphia is that No. 1 netminder Sam Ersson won’t be out for long with the lower-body injury he suffered on Saturday against the Boston Bruins. In fact, he accompanied the Flyers on the road trip, even skating after the formal morning skate for the game group on Tuesday morning.

But at the very least, he’s going to miss a bit of time. And in the interim, the Flyers turned to Aleksei Kolosov, just a little over a week removed from an AHL call-up and only a little over a month removed from his arrival in North America.

Kolosov didn’t put on a starring effort in Raleigh on Tuesday. But he at least kept the Flyers in the game.

Only on Goal No. 2 — a quick transition shot from South Jersey product Eric Robinson that Kolosov was set to stop but let get through him anyway — could Kolosov be deemed largely at fault. The others were more on blown coverages, ill-timed falls on the part of his skaters, or a little of both.

That’s not to say that Kolosov doesn’t shoulder his share of blame for the defeat. His odd move of the puck right back into play late in the third period helped to ultimately nullify a Flyers PP. The Robinson goal certainly wasn’t his finest moment, either.

But it’s worth noting that Kolosov did get a one-word bit of “praise” from Tortorella after the game, who deemed his performance “okay.” Given the circumstances, that was good enough for the Flyers — or at least should have been.

Tippett breaks through

After morning skate on Tuesday, Owen Tippett was asked if the team’s missed shots problem — which has hit Tippett particularly hard in the early going — was a product of a collective gripping-the-sticks phenomenon, or more a product of early-season random variance bound to correct itself.

“Yeah, I think it’s exactly like you said — random variance,” Tippett responded.

And then he went out against Carolina and supported his case.

At last, Tippett scored his long-awaited second goal of the season. It wasn’t a greasy rebound goal, or a fluky tip befitting his last name. No, it was exactly the type of shoot-for-the-corner snipe that his detractors would argue has helped lead to his accuracy problems in the early going (37.7 percent shot accuracy rate entering Tuesday). Except this time, Tippett hit his mark.

It wasn’t just the single goal, either. Tippett blasted 10 shot attempts on the night, and hit the net with six of them, good for a solid 60 percent rate much more in line with his 2023-24 accuracy rate of 53.1 percent.

“Yeah, I think that one tonight was a little more of knowing where to put it,” Tippett said with a slight smile when asked if he was trying to simply put the puck on net.

Perhaps the normalization process has finally begun.

Michkov’s manuever?

It’s now the third time that Matvei Michkov has done it. But the first time it resulted in a goal not credited to him.

He first broke it out on a power play in Washington on October 23, carrying the puck to the no-man’s-land between the points and the high slot and wristing a distance shot into the net. He did it once again three days later on a delayed penalty versus the Minnesota Wild. The logic is obvious — take advantage of the significant amount of traffic in front in such situations, and send an unexpected shot past a screened goalie.

This time, the puck didn’t make it through, hitting Owen Tippett on its way to the net. But a clean shot isn’t the only way Michkov’s maneuver can work out in his favor. The puck bounced right to the stick of Travis Konecny, who easily buried it to give the Flyers a 1-0 lead.

It’s still very early in Michkov’s career. But three attempts of a relatively unusual maneuver in less than a month hints at a trend. Perhaps Michkov might be making this a long-term part of his NHL arsenal. It’s certainly working for him so far, due to his strong lateral mobility, vision and shooting accuracy.

Michkov sits late

Despite Michkov’s early assist, he wasn’t on the ice late to help the Flyers try to tie the game with an empty net.

In fact, he wasn’t on the ice at all for the final 11 minutes of the game, with the exception of the brief PP that Emil Andrae’s penalty quickly erased.

Michkov wasn’t the only forward to be pulled from the 5-on-5 rotation — both Nicolas Deslauriers and Scott Laughton sat as well. But at the very least, when Tortorella shortened his bench, the player with 10 points in his first 13 NHL games didn’t remain in the mix.