Flyers fortunate that rivals continue to falter, because their play is in need of serious work

About eight hours before puck drop on Thursday night, Scott Laughton was asked if, in the midst of a tight playoff race, he checks the NHL standings on a daily basis, or superstitiously avoids them.

“I look when we win,” he said with a slight smirk.

So one can surmise he wasn’t checking the standings later that night. Instead, he was standing up in front of the media, straight up calling out himself and his teammates after a thoroughly underwhelming 6-2 defeat at the hands of the Toronto Maple Leafs.

“Everyone’s got to look in the mirror and figure out what we need to do collectively as a group here to get better,” Laughton said. “Because, especially on home ice, that’s just not good enough, it’s not hard enough. It’s not good enough.”

Goofy questions from reporters regarding standings watching, in other words, are the least of the Flyers’ concerns at the moment.

Basically, the Philadelphia Flyers are in trouble. For a month now, they’ve been playing underwhelming hockey — they have a 5-6-2 record since February 15, a stretch bookended by two losses at the hands of the Leafs. Their defense has been gutted, by injury and by the deadline trade of Sean Walker. And they’ve now lost two of their last three games in blowout fashion, with six more brutally difficult matchups in front of them before their schedule finally, mercifully, takes a friendly turn.

“It’s not good enough this time of year, especially in the stretch that we’re in,” Laughton added.

It would appear that everything is working against the Flyers right now in their quest to secure their first playoff spot since 2020. Except for one key factor — those standings that Laughton almost certainly didn’t check on Thursday night.

The Flyers may be struggling right now. But so are pretty much all of the teams chasing them.

The Islanders, fresh off a five-game winning streak that included victories over Boston and Dallas, have now dropped two straight and haven’t scored a goal in over 121 minutes. Detroit, once playing so well that they appeared a playoff lock, have now lost seven straight — including two defeats at the hands of the Arizona Coyotes. Washington followed up their big win over the Flyers on March 1 by going 3-3-0, and now are facing an even more brutal end-of-month schedule than are the Flyers. The Devils sold Tyler Toffoli at the deadline and are still flailing. The Penguins sold Jake Guentzel and haven’t beaten a non-bottom five team since February 27. The only team in the Eastern Conference playoff mix with any semblance of momentum right now are the Buffalo Sabres, winners of three straight (including victories over the Isles and Red Wings), and they had essentially been given up for dead just a couple weeks ago.

It’s ugly out there.

That’s not to say that the Flyers will be able to sustain a seven-game losing streak and hang onto their playoff spot, however. And if they play as poorly over the next two weeks as they did last night, that’s certainly on the table.

According to assistant coach Brad Shaw — sharing primary bench duties with fellow assistant Rocky Thompson due to John Tortorella’s two-game suspension — the coaches and players emphasized before the game the importance of establishing their preferred style of play upon the Maple Leafs, rather than letting talented Toronto impose their game on the Flyers. Instead, the Leafs scored just 121 seconds in, and were up 2-0 before the midpoint of the first period.

“Hopefully it’s a good lesson. Hopefully, we realize that you can lose a game in the first ten minutes,” Shaw noted.

Then, to the Flyers’ credit, they pushed back in the second period, cutting the deficit to 3-1 and skating right with the Leafs for the bulk of the middle stanza. Just one month ago, they had erased the exact same deficit in the third period against this very same opponent — there was no reason why they couldn’t do it again, this time on home ice.

Instead, the third period was a repeat of the first. Auston Matthews ripped his 55th goal of the season past relief netminder Felix Sandström, and then the Flyers collapsed, allowing their fifth goal of the night just eight seconds later and then yet another just a few minutes after that.

It was, as Shaw noted, uncharacteristic of their season to date — more a callback to the previous three seasons of embarrassing Flyers hockey than anything seen in 2023-24.

“One of our strengths this year has been our resilience mentally. When a bad thing happened or a goal goes in the net, we seem to be able to weather the storm and gather ourselves, and get back on the attack,” Shaw said. “We’ve done such a good job staying away from those scenarios previously throughout the year. I have no explanation for it.”

Well, there are two potential explanations: goaltending and defense.

Sam Ersson has been a revelation for the bulk of this season, and the primary reason why the Flyers didn’t fall apart in the wake of Carter Hart’s indefinite leave of absence and subsequent sexual assault charges in late January and early February. His 0.898 save percentage may look underwhelming at first glance, but given the leaguewide increase in scoring over the past few seasons, it’s right in line with the NHL average of 0.899, and well above average after taking into account the quality of shots that Ersson has faced (+6.25 Goals Saved Above Expected, per Evolving-Hockey).

Ersson is usually quite good — in 65 percent of his games, he’s stopped more shots than expected given the quality and quantity he’s faced, per Evolving-Hockey’s xG model. For reference, Vezina Trophy favorites Connor Hellebuyck, Jacob Markstrom, Thatcher Demko and Sergei Bobrovsky are at 71.4 percent, 73.8 percent, 64 percent and 65.3 percent, respectively.

Ersson’s problem comes in the one-third of games when he doesn’t have his best stuff. In six of those 14 games, he’s allowed two more goals than expected, and Thursday almost certainly would have been the seventh had he not been pulled after the first period, given his total whiff on a distance shot from noted sniper Timothy Liljegren.

“It’s a clear shot from way out. Definitely one I want to have back,” Ersson noted.

On Saturday against the Lightning, Ersson appeared to let a failed puck cover on Tampa’s second goal linger with him, with his technique rapidly collapsing to the point that he couldn’t stop a routine Conor Sheary shot with no screen just minutes later. Thursday was a repeat of the same issue, where another failed attempt at covering the puck on the first goal and a bad bounce on the second seemingly shook Ersson enough to lead to the truly ugly Liljegren tally.

His two stellar showings recently against San Jose and Florida hint that it’s not as simple as Ersson just running out of gas due to the heavy workload (14 of 17 starts since the all-star break). And Ersson has proven fully capable of bouncing back from bad starts, as he showed on Tuesday versus the Sharks, just three days after his stinker against Tampa. His bigger problem appears to be holding down the fort when lacking his A-game — not allowing a mediocre game turn into one that is essentially unwinnable for his club due to multiple weak goals allowed.

“It’s just a mental (thing). You have to just release what’s been, and just focus on the next play all the time,” Ersson noted.

That said, it’s not all on Ersson. He doesn’t exactly have a high-end blueline corps protecting him now.

Part of the Flyers’ current issues are of their own making — after all, they did choose to trade Sean Walker last week to further their long-term asset accumulation strategy. And while that was probably the right move for their rebuild, it made an already injury-ravaged blueline even thinner for the stretch run. Jamie Drysdale and Rasmus Ristolainen are questionable to return at all this season, and Nick Seeler has yet to return to the ice with his teammates after blocking a shot off his foot last Tuesday against St. Louis (in an interview after signing his contract extension, Seeler designated himself “week-to-week”). Only Travis Sanheim, Cam York and rookie Egor Zamula remain from the blueline corps that helped take down the Panthers in the team’s first game back out of the all-star break last month.

As a result, Zamula is now playing on the second pair, rather than being eased into the NHL in sheltered third-pair duties, as he has been most of the season. Marc Staal, used largely as a No. 7 this season, has been thrust into an every-night role, largely on that second pair. Erik Johnson is 35, by his own admission past his prime, and learning a new system while acclimating himself to new teammates. And promising rookie Ronnie Attard is being asked to adapt to NHL speed on the fly, in the midst of a playoff race, against basically every top Eastern Conference team.

This isn’t a recipe for lots of wins.

The Flyers, to their credit, refused to pin the team’s recent struggles on the defense, which in fairness, do predate the current blueline situation.

“Well, we still have to find a way. Our defense corps is good enough to have success in these games, in big moments,” Brad Shaw said. “We just have to perform a little bit better. I think the whole group, I think the five-man units have to perform better.”

“I think we have confidence in who’s back there, and we’ve got to be better in front of them,” Laughton added.

Still, the deck is stacked against the Flyers entering the stretch run. They’re riding a rookie goalie and a depleted blueline corps, during an absolutely brutal schedule, with the intensity ratcheted up even further than normal due to the playoff implications of each and every single night.

“Part of what we have to learn is what’s necessary as far as effort at this time of year to have success. We’ve got a lot of guys that still have to learn all that,” Shaw noted. “They have to recognize how hard you have to play to have any chance at this time of year.”

And perhaps that’s actually the driving force here, and not inherent personnel flaws. Laughton certainly seemed to think so, that Thursday was less about the Flyers’ roster being exploited and more about the team’s on-ice mentality not matching the moment. In Laughton’s mind, getting back on track Saturday versus the Bruins is about a mindset adjustment more than anything else.

“We’re gonna have to play a simple, disgusting road game and squeak one out there,” Laughton said.

And if they don’t? Well, there’s always the hope that those other teams in the standings that Laughton surely didn’t check last night continue to squander the opportunity to take the spot that the Flyers — despite their struggles — still hold.