Flyers blown out by Blue Jackets for 7th straight loss, slide out of playoff spot originally appeared on NBC Sports Philadelphia
Three days between games and John Tortorella’s plea did not fix the Flyers’ struggles.
The club suffered a damaging back-to-back set, capped off Saturday night by a 6-2 drubbing from the Blue Jackets at Nationwide Arena in Columbus, Ohio. On Friday night, the Flyers fell to the Sabres, 4-2.
Tortorella’s team has fallen out of playoff position with four games to go.
The Flyers (36-31-11) have dropped seven games in a row. They’ve been outscored 33-15 over this season-worst skid.
Saturday night marked their 17th loss in the last 24 games (7-12-5).
Olle Lycksell and Adam Ginning, two Swedish rookies, each scored their first career NHL goal in the defeat.
Thirteen different Blue Jackets tallied a point and all six of Columbus’ goals came from defensemen.
The Flyers went 2-1-1 against the Blue Jackets (26-39-12) in their four-game regular-season series. Columbus is in last place of the Eastern Conference.
• An impassioned Tortorella tried to regroup his Flyers this week. The team was hoping three straight days without a game would provide a reset.
It didn’t happen.
The Flyers slipped out of third place Friday night and out of the Eastern Conference’s second wild-card spot Saturday night.
They’re two points behind the third-place Islanders and New York has played one fewer game. The Penguins seized the East’s second wild-card position with a win over the Lightning and the Flyers’ loss. Both clubs have 83 points, but Pittsburgh has a game in hand on the Flyers and more regulation wins.
The Flyers entered Saturday with a 32.3 percent chance to make the postseason, according to Hockey-Reference.com’s probabilities report. They now go two more days without a game. Here are the latest standings.
• People are probably wondering what has gone wrong with this Flyers team that had held down third place for over two months before stumbling into this skid.
Right now, the Flyers look like a team with no answers at all. They were never a high-end scoring club. So if you add in confidence issues, that spells trouble.
The seven-game gauntlet last month had to take a lot out of them. They found a way to grab at least a point in four of the seven games (2-3-2). But it felt like a seven-game playoff series in which a team exhausts everything and has little gas left for the next series.
The Flyers are also pretty young. They had 12 players with no playoff experience dress Saturday night. Their captain Sean Couturier was out this weekend with an upper-body injury and was benched for two games last month. And they have clearly missed Sean Walker and Carter Hart.
Walker was more valuable to this team than many thought. The rebuilding Flyers supplemented their future by trading the 29-year-old defenseman two days before the deadline. They’ve gone 4-8-3 without him and have surrendered 4.20 goals per game.
The Flyers have been without Hart since Jan. 23, when the 25-year-old goaltender requested a personal leave of absence because of a sexual assault case. In net, the Flyers have a rookie who has had to play a lot this season and another rookie who just arrived.
• On Saturday night, for the fourth time in the last seven games, the Flyers fell behind 2-0.
They never got closer than two goals. By second intermission, the Blue Jackets had a 4-1 lead.
Samuel Ersson yielded six goals on 33 shots.
The Flyers had a significant missed opportunity when they came up empty on a four-minute power play early in the first period. It was a great chance for Tortorella’s club to set the tone and play with a lead.
Once the Flyers fell behind, they seemed to press when they had looks offensively.
Columbus netminder Jet Greaves stopped 37 of the Flyers’ 39 shots.
• The Flyers are scheduled to practice Monday in Voorhees, New Jersey before heading to Montreal for a matchup Tuesday with the Canadiens (7 p.m. ET/NBCSP+).
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