The Flyers are good enough to win the Stanley Cup this year, but they are being defeated, not by the other teams, but by small bounces, atrocious calls, and just plain bad luck.
Take game 2 against the Pittsburg Penguins as an example. The 4-2 loss came after the Flyers outworked and flat-out beat the Penguins through two and three quarters periods. Face it Pens fans, the Flyers controlled the tempo, which is hard to do on the horrible ice conditions provided by the Mellon Arena, and dominated the physical play. There's no two ways about it, the Orange and the Black came to play in the second game.
However, Sid the Kid, or as he has been called by Steve Coates of CSN and David Boreanez, a celebrity blogger for NHL.com, Sidney Lugainis and Rico Sanchez, got lucky. It's that simple. He still hasn't deserved a goal that he scored against the Flyers. In game one he was given a gift and did absoultely nothing to earn that point. In game two he got a lucky (or unlucky, depending on your location) bounce off the stick of Lasse. It was just weak. What's worse is that he's still touted as the best player in the league when for my money he'd be the fourth pick after Mike Richards, Evgeni Malkin and Dion Phaneuff of player under 25. He's a punk and he can't even grow a good playoff beard, god sakes. Next up, the atrocious officiating. So far in this playoff year the referees and linesmen have had the consistancy of vomit and the taste to boot. The hit that Malkin gave Danny Briere was down right cheap. "A forearm shiver" as it was called on T.V. --that's funny I would have described it as a blatant elbow designed to injur one of the best players on the Flyers-- should have drawed more attention than just the Philadelphia bench. For a second let us imagine that the hit in question was dolled out by one Steve Downie on the aforementioned Sidney Rico Sanchez Lugainis. Downie would be gone, I mean suspended for 10+ games, fined upwards of $25,000 and the Flyers would also be shouldered with a bill from the league. The NHL won't even take a second look at the hit. As far as they are concerned it may as well never happened. Don't even get me started on that "hook" that Hatcher put on Malkin. How can one be capable of hookign when he doesn't even have two hands on his stick? Positional defense is aparently prohibited in the playoffs this year.
Luck. Yeah its a funny thing. One day you're nailing posts and crossbars with shots that should, in all right, be guaranteed goals, the next you can't miss the net even if you hit it with the but end of your stick. Although I just described Mike Knuble's career, I am more mad about the injuries that just piled up on the Fly Guys and give everone, but the team and die-hard fans, an excuse to count the team out of the race completely. First Kimmo Timonen goes down with a blod clot. The worst part of this is that all the media, all the print, all the television, all the talk is about how the Flyers cannot go on without him. Though it does spark some good, yet off-colour jokes. (How are the Flyers like a cancer patient? No one is giving them a shot without Kimmo--Horrible, I know, yet I cannot resist) On top of all that, Braydon Coburn, a young blue-liner who has come into his own and established himself as a top-shelf defensemen in the NHL under John Stevens, is out after getting hit in the face with a horribly unlucky shot. (The thing that really gets me is that he only got hit because Malkin booked it out of the way like a little puppy darting out of a room when the vaccuum comes on.) 50+ stitches later the Flyers are down two d-men and are faced with a 0-2 hole in the series.
But, I have faith. Coming back to Philly--where the ice is fast and the crowd is raucus--will be horribly difficult for the Penguins. Sanchez-Lugainis and Malkin have no idea what awaits them in the City of Brotherly Love. I cannot wait to see how loud the Wachovia Center gets when one of them gets planted by Hatcher or Gator. Look for the Flyers to win two straight, take it back to Pittsburg, whoop 'em on their ice then come back and wrap-up the series in Philly. 4-2 Flyers series win, four straight wins for the Flyers and a date with the Wings in the Finals. It's coming, so...WAKE UP PHILADELPHIA AND LET ME HEAR YOU SING--THE ORANGE AND THE BLACK, THE ORANGE AND THE BLACK!
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