Thursday, April 9, 2009

Peepin' Foes: Philadelphia Flyers

Where We Are: Eighth place with 91 points, one less than Montreal, two more than Florida with two games to go. Given that the Rangers hold the wins tiebreaker right now, a win against Philly will stamp the passport to the playoffs - as will a Florida loss to Atlanta so there will be some significant scoreboard watching.

Where They Are: Well the Flyers did the Blueshirts a huge favour already by beating the Panthers on Tuesday. The Garden roared when the 2-1 final score was posted as did the Wachovia Center as the victory sealed a playoff spot for the orange and black with three games to go - Thursday at the Garden, Saturday against the Isles and Sunday at home against the Rangers. They aren't about to be complacent as they are tied with the Canes for the fourth spot in the conference - home ice.

Who To Watch For: Jeff Carter has 45 goals. Can you believe that? Jeff freakin Carter. The guy Flyer fans were ready to ditch after RJ Umberger had a great playoff last season. Mike Richards - he of the 3-on-5 shortie - is always dangerous and rookie Claude Giroux has proved to be quite the offensive threat. And you can never count out Arron Asham and Scott Hartnell, who both seem to step up their games against the Rangers. Last time the two teams played they were kept quiet and the Rangers won 4-1 ...

What To Watch For: Rozy and Borat both played hard against the Habs but you could clearly tell that both were still hurting from their injuries. Will the day off improve their conditions significantly enough for them to contribute more? Antropov seemed able to fight through his soreness and scored a huge goal but Rozy was clearly still skating gingerly.

What We'll (Hopefully) See: Philly is 26-2-6 (!!) when Carter scores so hopefully we will see him kept off the scoresheet. Colton Orr to prove his usefulness again and beat the living hell out of cementhead Cote while keeping crazy Carcillo in line. Oh, and the Garden to one day do a deal like Wachovia had for the Florida game - Dollar Pretzel Night. Since that isn't likely to ever happen (Dolan loves his profit margin) I guess we can settle for a playoff atmosphere hopefully devoid of orange idiots.

Also Check Out: Flyer Files is a decent MSM blog and Mirtle managed to get himself a Broad Street bum to do a blog over at SBN.

4 comments:

Patrick Hoffman said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Patrick Hoffman said...

Who do you folks think the best defensive pairing should be to play against Carter's line?

Scotty Hockey said...

Tough call, probably Morris/Mara as size can be a factor. Plus it would free Girardi and Staal a bit. Then again, Dan and Marc are the top pairing so you want them against the top line ... ugh. Can't think too much about it, get too nervous at this point ...

Sammael said...

I still think that Girardi is the best D we got, with Mara and Stahl coming in close second. Stahl still makes occassional coverage mistakes, but noone is perfect. Great instincts for being so young. Girardi was a damned natural from day one. Why can't we just clone Girardi, damnit!