PHILADELPHIA — The intent was to do the late Ed Snider proud, but it surely didn’t turn out that way.
His beloved hockey club was thrashed. Philadelphia’s hockey fans revolted, throwing commemorative electronic bracelets on the ice – seriously, they gave a Flyers hockey crowd thousands of projectiles to hurl – hitting players in the head and drawing a delay-of-game penalty to add to the one-sided nature of the contest.
No, not good.
But let’s be real here. The best team is winning this Washington-Philadelphia First round Stanley Cup series, and doing so in a way that amplifies their dominance during the regular season and makes us understand, in the memorable words of football coach Dennis Green, that they are what we thought they were.
Big. Talented. Sound in every facet of the game. Hungry. And very, very ready.
It’s easy to get the sense this series against a lesser opponent is nonetheless the hardest part for the Capitals, dismissing their ghosts and failures of past spring, and confidently getting through their opening round assignment.
“People always mention stuff from before, but that’s not relevant to what we have in front of us,” said veteran Capitals winger Jason Chimera. “The guys have been good about knocking obstacles down one by one all year.”
The Caps surely look like the class of the East, a solid bet to make it to their first Cup final. We’ll see. Lots can happen before then, and even while manhandling the Flyers with relative ease in a 6-1 triumph on Monday evening, the Caps lost rock-ribbed defenceman Brooks Orpik to a suspected concussion partway through the second period.
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It’s the kind of injury that could be a significant problem later on, and the kind of injury that makes one remember the Caps would have loved to have landed Dan Hamhuis for depth at the trade deadline – he wouldn’t accept a trade east – and ended up acquiring Mike Weber instead.
Later in the third, with the game well in hand and the usual third period nonsense erupting that the league seems powerless to get rid of, Philly forward Pierre-Edouard Bellemare ran another Washington defenceman, Dmitry Orlov, head-first into the end boards. Bellemare was tossed, while Orlov was able to stay in the game.
Beyond those wounds, however, the Capitals are now up 3-0 in the series and are poised to emerge from this round looking extremely dangerous. They have been, for the most part, dominant over the Flyers, who have found their best weapons – Claude Giroux, Jakub Voracek, dynamic rookie defenceman Shayne Gostisbehere – completely neutralized while all the key Washington players have figured in the series to some degree.
Alex Ovechkin with two, Evgeny Kuznetsov and Marcus Johansson all scored, Nicklas Backstrom played all night like he had the puck on a string and Braden Holtby was strong again, and has allowed only two Philly goals in three games.
With the Flyers gradually losing composure as the night went on, the Caps scored five power-play goals against very passive Philly penalty killing. The chippier the home team got, the more Washington mercilessly poured it on.
“We pulled away… they weren’t interested in playing anymore,” said Washington head coach Barry Trotz.
Trotz seemed disgusted by the Flyers’ tactics and the reaction of the fans, with several of his players hit by the flying bracelets.
“It wasn’t good for the game,” he said. “It’s on national TV… it doesn’t display our game very well. The game got out of hand… we took their best punch.”
Flyer coach Dave Hakstol tried to separate the first 50 minutes of the game from the final 10, but acknowledged the simple fact the Caps have the puck most of the time and the Flyers seem helpless to do anything about it.
“To say the least, we’re disappointed,” he said.
There was genuine emotion in the building at the outset after a fond video tribute to Snider, who helped found the Flyers a half-century ago and died of bladder cancer on April 11 after seeing his hockey club qualify for the playoffs one last time.
The Flyers had his initials “EMS” painted on the ice behind each goal, and handed out bright orange T-shirts with Snider’s silhouette imposed over the Flyer crest.
Lauren Hart pumped out “God Bless America” in conjuction with a video of Kate Smith, and all seemed possible, particularly after Michael Raffl got the Flyers on the board early just 57 seconds into the game.
“I don’t think anybody was rattled by that,” said a confident Holtby.
That lead lasted less than four minutes before a John Carlson point shot glanced off Johansson’s leg, and when Ovechkin gave the visitors the lead just before the nine-minute mark of the second, the direction of the game seemed clear. On that play, Ovechkin cleverly hid by the Washington bench behind towering linesman Matt MacPherson, then accepted a pass and fired a 35-foot wrist shot that Flyers goalie Steve Mason could only wave at.
In the third, a bizarre bounce off the glass in the Flyer end off a Justin Williams shoot-in saw the puck drop into the Philadelphia crease, off the glove of Mason and into the slot. Kuznetsov hadn’t scored in the series to that point, but he accepted the gift and worked a pretty deke around Mason for a 3-1 lead.
“That was huge for us,” said Ovechkin. “We really needed that goal.”
Then came three more goals, with the Flyer penalty killers forced to absorb one haymaker after another from the lethal Washington power play, painfully blocking as many shots as they could despite the lost-cause nature of the game. The Caps expressed their hatred for the Flyers and their disdain for their tactics by pouring it on.
“This is not going to change easily,” said Flyers winger Wayne Simmonds afterwards. “We’ve got to be desperate (next game). Not out of control, but desperate.”
The truth of course, is that the Flyers were probably themselves surprised to earn a playoff spot in Hakstol’s first year, and that they are in way over their heads against the powerful Caps. Washington GM Brian MacLellan has intelligently added some nice pieces like Williams and T.J. Oshie, youngsters like Orlov and Kuznetsov are maturing and Holtby may be the best in the game right now. That No. 8 fellow, meanwhile, is playing like a force of nature.
It’s possible we’ll look back and say that the Flyers might have had the best opportunity to knock off Washington in the First round before the Caps were able to generate belief that they wouldn’t do another playoff face-plant.
But Philadelphia just didn’t have the firepower, and soon they’ll be on the sidelines, facing a promising future, but without the guiding hand of the man who imagined it all 50 years ago and then made it come true.
