December 14, 2025
Kyle Ross/Imagn Images
Travis Konecny, Trevor Zegras, and the Flyers have to figure out the next level of their offense.
There were two instances Saturday night, one at the start and one at the end, that summed up where the game would ultimately go for the Flyers.
At the start, Sean Couturier picked up a flubbed puck at the point, and he was off to the races. He had all the time and space to take a shot all alone, but slowed up, looked to his left, thought for too long, then tossed a pass over to Carl Grundstrom when it was too late and they were all out of room.
At the end, Travis Konecny had the puck on his stick in a tie game, and was breaking toward the net with Trevor Zegras. Konecny, left of the net, stopped moving his feet and waited to the point where everyone knew he was passing. Then the puck caught a hitch in the ice, and he knuckled it across the crease to Zegras trying to salvage the one-time shot. But it was too late.
The Flyers, who stretched into overtime for the second time in as many games, lost to the Carolina Hurricanes, 4-3, in the shootout at Xfinity Mobile Arena, having also lost their once automatic path to two points in the standings along with it, when Hurricanes netminder Pyotr Kochetkov blanked Philadelphia for its first shootout defeat of the year.
The Flyers went into the first intermission Saturday night leading, 2-0, but they slowed up. They thought too much, they hesitated, then they got burned.
They suppressed a lot of danger from another one of the NHL's playoff elites, holding Carolina to just 21 shots for the game after limiting Jack Eichel and the Vegas Golden Knights to 22 on Thursday, but on the flip side, the Flyers weren't exactly terrifying with the puck themselves.
They only generated 19 shots against Vegas on Thursday, while their power play went 0-for-3, then registered just 18 on Saturday against Carolina, having never gotten a look on the man advantage or even much of a chance to work in the offensive zone during the 3-on-3 overtime frame.
Across both games, they struggled to get to the middle of the ice, and as cliché as it is, they just couldn't bring themselves to throw pucks on net and swarm the opposing crease. That burned them.
Then, with all the skill from Zegras and Matvei Mickov, along with the patience in the crease brought by goaltenders Sam Ersson and Dan Vladar when left against skaters one-on-one, the Flyers couldn't fall back on the shootout and their formerly perfect 5-0 record in it as a safety net anymore.
Neither of Zegras, Michkov, or Konecny could beat Kochetkov, and Carolina's Jackson Blake had the answer against Ersson to tuck home the winner.
That burned the Flyers, too.
They're a young team, one that is building forward, and one that just kept up with three of the NHL's very best in Colorado, Vegas, and Carolina across their past four games, while putting an also-rebuilding San Jose away pretty efficiently in between.
And there is something to be said about that. That kind of play, having lost each of those three games by only one goal with the latter two going beyond regulation, is promising. It is progress. But at the same time, this team has shown flashes of being capable of more, of taking themselves to the next level, but haven't quite put together the puzzle pieces to pull it off yet – or depending on who you ask, are maybe stubbornly refusing to.
But then again, that is a part of learning.
And part of learning is getting burned.
"There's positives," head coach Rick Tocchet said postgame Saturday night. "I'm gonna take the positive, but I think we just gotta start to learn when teams put pressure on us, that we gotta find the pressure. We can't back off. That's what I believe in."
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