Shayne Gostisbehere was the only Flyer who was publicly honest about Saturday’s 6-5 overtime loss to the Tampa Bay Lightning:

“I mean we got a point out of it, but I don’t know if we had any business getting a point today.”

It’s always refreshing to hear blunt honesty. But the more disturbing thing is to hear the rest of his teammates – and his coach – wax poetically after this stinkburger of a hockey game about how well the team played and how there was solid effort and there are a lot of good things to build on.

Let’s break it down this way:

• The Flyers have now lost three-straight games after a 5-0-1 stretch got them back to respectability.
• All three games, mind you, have occurred on home ice, where the team has been dreadful this season.
• In the game itself, the Flyers penalty kill allowed three more goals in four shorthanded situations, and one was an abject mess of systemic hockey.
• There was a 22-minute stretch in the game where the Flyers were outscored 5-1. Most of that time was in the second period, and the coach, displaying great delusion, said, “Our first two periods were good periods. We came out of it on the wrong end of it. We have to do a little bit more. But our first two periods were pretty darn good periods.”
• For the record, it was 3-1 Tampa after two periods.
• The team is playing with two goalies who are no better than AHL level. With Brian Elliott out for at least two weeks and Michael Neuvirth occupying his customary place on injured reserve, the Flyers goaltending duo at the moment is Calvin Pickard and Alex Lyon. Lyon hasn’t been given a shot yet, but Pickard allowed six goals on 26 shots against Tampa and made no big saves when the team needed him.
• His goals against average is now 4.60 and his save percentage is .852. Both are the worst in the NHL among goalies who have played in at least five games this season.
• After allowing six more goals, the Flyers have the second-worst goals against average in the NHL (3.56) and have allowed the third-most goals in the league.

Yeah, really solid effort, boys.

Now, there were positives in the game. It’s not lost on me in this analysis that the power play – the much beleaguered and criticized power play – finally had a good game. The Flyers scored three power play goals. They hadn’t done that since last Jan. 4 against the Islanders – a span of 62 games.

They did badly outshoot one of the best teams in hockey significantly (45-26) and they did stage an epic comeback, scoring four goals in a span of 6:04 in the final 10 minutes of the third period, becoming only the ninth team in the history of the NHL to do so.

(It should be noted here that the NHL originally sent out a note saying it was the first time in league history that this happened. It was written everywhere in initial stories, so you might have seen it, but the league was wrong and later corrected that error).

And although Hakstol is off his rocker about the second period, and the players are fooling themselves with all the talk about playing a mostly good game and showing a never-say-die attitude in coming back the way they did, they did have an excellent first period. Despite not scoring, they showed they are a team that can feed off emotion, albeit sometimes that emotion takes them the wrong way – more on that in a minute.

Still, the mistakes continue to mount. The same deficiencies rear their ugly heads repeatedly and at the most inopportune times. And although there is talent here, and, at times the Flyers make you think they are turning the corner, they remain nothing more than inconsistent and mediocre. They are 9-9-2 at the quarter pole of the season. In the three previous seasons under Hakstol they were:

• 2015-16: 6-9-5 (17 points)
• 2016-17: 9-8-3 (21 points)
• 2017-18: 8-8-4 (20 points)

Notice a trend?

And here is an example of the worst trend about the Flyers:

That's a cool five goals in his last two games for Brayden Point, in case you were wondering.#TBLvsPHI | #GoBolts pic.twitter.com/3pjFWzFvgz

— Tampa Bay Lightning (@TBLightning) November 17, 2018

Not one player on the ice does anything right for the Flyers.

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