When I first hopped back onto Flyers coverage eight days ago, the team was doing surprisingly well. At the time they were 6-3-2, Carter Hart was catching bullets with his teeth in goal, and they were incredibly opportunistic, taking advantage of opposition mistakes to cash in on goals.

That first game back for me was St. Louis. It was a game where the Flyers played very well, with only a little backpedaling early in the third period.

Lukas Sedlak’s goal – his first as a Flyer – put the Flyers up 4-1 in the third period of what would eventually be a 5-1 victory to run their record to 7-3-2.

“I thought the start of the third was important, the four-on-four and penalty kill,” coach John Tortorella said at the time. “We ended up sitting on our heels a little bit and all teams do it when you have that lead. I just like the way we responded after they scored their first one. Obviously the fourth was a big goal and I thought we checked. We were smart. We just played a simple game, blue line to blue line. I just liked the way we were as a team, just trying to stay within our concept.”

As Keith Jones says, it started with some good work down low by Zack MacEwen and Noah Cates. That’s what sets up the opportunity for the goal. Yes, Nick Seeler makes a great pass and Sedlak sneaks in the backhander for the goal, but it doesn’t happen without good battling by MacEwen and Cates, who are more unheralded on the play.

“I think we’ve received a lot of good minutes from the mid-part of our lineup,” Tortorella told me. “It’s along the boards, it’s being smart on our blue lines. Our tracking was really good (vs. St. Louis) as far as not giving them a lot of odd man rushes, and it comes from guys we don’t really talk about that often, and that’s a really good thing for the team.”

I took Torts’ cue and had a great one-on-one conversation with MacEwen about his increased role. Mostly just a fringe guy in his career, Playing on the fourth line or being a healthy scratch, or bobbing up and down between the AHL and NHL, Torts’ has called on MacEwen for a lot more. He’s playing middle six minutes, He’s on the power play. He’s just keeping his nose to the grindstone and doing whatever the coach wants him to do.

MacEwen told me he believes in what Torts is preaching and that if the team can just keep following that system and that belief, it could continue to find some unexpected success.

That would have been a nice story following that game. It would have been a happy return to some positives for a hockey team that has had very little good to talk about since the world shut down because of the pandemic in March, 2020.

Yet, while hopping back into hockey after a summer and thrilling fall of baseball is like riding a bike for me in year 23 writing about the Flyers, there was something that just didn’t seem right.

I had watched about 65% of the their games in total before that St. Louis game, and from my eye test on television, what they were doing, wasn’t sustainable.

In short, goaltending was carrying them.

The Flyers were getting outshot, out-chanced, out-everythinged – except in goal – and were still winning games.

Unless something changed with the way the skaters were playing, it was only a matter of time before there was some regression for the goaltending, especially from Hart, who was playing so well it’s as if the opponents were shooting pucks at a mouse hole in the wall.

So, I waited… I needed to see more. I looked ahead at the next three games. I saw a road game in Columbus and back-to-back games at home against Ottawa and Dallas.

Normally, this would be a good stretch of games to continue to build on that great start, but the problem was, the Ottawa game was the return of Claude Giroux to Philadelphia for the first time as an opponent.

You just knew that was going to be an emotional game, and it’s likely that the Flyers could look past a floundering Blue Jackets team, thinking they’ve been playing well enough to beat them, before the back-to back at home.

And then, knowing the Ottawa game would be emotional, and with the Senators coming in on a long losing streak, it had a chance to be physical, and with Dallas looking like one of the Western Conference favorites early on this season, there was a chance for the Flyers to be gassed by the time Sunday afternoon rolled around.

And just like that, things started to sour… especially the coach’s temper.

COLUMBUS CALAMITY, PART ONE

Things really didn’t go well for Torts in his first game back in Columbus since coaching that team for six years. Turnovers galore and simple mistakes put the Flyers behind 3-0. They tried to get back into it with a pair of goals, but Columbus found the empty net twice to win 5-2. It was probably the worst game of the season in Tortorella’s mind (either this or the the 3-0 loss at home to San Jose), but no one could find out, because Tortorella declined to speak to the media after the game, sending associate coach Brad Shaw out instead.

Our local scribes who flew to Columbus weren’t happy with this, as the agreement between the league and the Professional Hockey Writers Association requires the head coach to be available after every game, so they complained – to both the Flyers and the league.

After an off day,  this led to a Saturday morning response from Torts to Sam Carchidi, who happens to be the chairman of the Philadelphia chapter of the PHWA, about why he didn’t talk after the game.

Torts would have more for Sam AFTER the Ottawa game, but let’s get to that one…

SENATORS SETBACK

Honestly, this was an entertaining game. And even more honestly, the Flyers played pretty damn well overall. There were a lot of good things in this game. They played physical. They controlled the puck for much of the game. They generated scoring chances. Ottawa goalie Cam Talbot was really good. He let up the first goal and then was a stone wall.

Meanwhile, late into he second period and early in the third, the Flyers hade three consecutive penalties, the Senators scored on two of them. Former Flyer captain Claude Giroux, who was given a hero’s welcome before the game, turned into a bit of a Trojan horse for the Flyers as he then unleashed two, patented primary assists that led to the tying goal and backbreaking insurance marker in what would be a 4-1 Senators win.

The penalties pissed off Tortorella more than anything:

“You look at the penalties that they called (early), three on [them], none on [us],” he said. “At the end of the night, it’s going to even out one way or another. You just can’t be doing it. They’re just needless penalties. We had the puck on two of them, to be honest with you, three of them. That changes the whole complexion of the game.”

Then, his mood got worse when Carchidi tried to find out who was starting the game the next afternoon against the Stars.

Not that it mattered who was playing in goal Sunday….

DALLAS DEBACLE

Again, the effort was there. The final score may not show it, but for being beaten 5-1 the Flyers actually played a better game than that – at even strength anyway.

The problem was the special teams.

First, the Power Play was 0-for-6 for the game and gave up a shorthanded goal.  The Flyers PP now ranks 26th of 32 teams in the NHL. That’s not good.

Then, the penalty kill, which started off the season strong, allowed two more goals against Dallas after allowing two against Ottawa and is suddenly 21st in the NHL – also not good.

There’s no doubt Torts was unhappy with the special teams, but he chose Sunday to be a time where he defended his team to the hilt.

“You can boo us, you can talk shit about us, but I will back those guys because they are trying.”

On to the very next period of hockey….

COLUMBUS CALAMITY. PART 2

Back where this slide started, the Flyers had a chance to eradicate some demons and get back on the horse. Of course, they fell behind early again last night, leading to this wonderful television exchange between former Flyers goalie Brian Boucher, calling the game for ESPN, and Torts on the bench:

Torts didn’t back them long, eh?

Combine that with the fact that the Flyers coach was kicked in the face by a horse before leaving for Columbus Monday and, well, it’s been a rough week.

The Flyers again showed some fight, twice coming back from two-goal deficits to force overtime and get at least a point, but the Blue Jackets got them again in the extra session with the game-winner:

Tic-Tac-Toe, the Flyers have now lost four in a row.

After the game Torts was more subdued. He was still frothy about the start, but credited the team with coming back twice and being resilient, and yet they still found a way to lose.

Maybe the goaltending isn’t saving their bacon and covering their mistakes as much as they did in the first dozen games of the season..

Consider, the Flyers have allowed 19 goals in this four game skid. They had allowed 19 goals in their previous eight games.

Hart, who allowed 15 goals in is first eight games, has allowed 11 in his last three.

Things won’t get any easier as they head to Boston tomorrow to face a Bruins team that is off to the fastest start in the league at 14-2-0 with a goal differential of plus-30.

And if they lose that one, and the winless streak hits five games, you know everyone is going to start to wonder if this is another one of those 10-game skids the Flyers have been prone too in recent seasons.

They Flyers are still just two points out of a playoff spot but are now just six points up on the teams with the worst record in hockey.

And while it’s still November and talk of playoff positioning may seem crazy, it should be noted that teams that 80 percent of teams that find themselves in a playoff position come Black Friday end up making the playoffs in April.

Will the Flyers be there after the next four games?

Only time will tell, but the excitement of the early season success seems to be fading quickly, and no matter how hard the team tries, maybe, just maybe, it’s possible they don’t have the talent needed to succeed over the course of a season – which may not come as a surprise to most of us, but remember, GM Chuck Fletcher said they were excited to prove everyone wrong.

The city isn’t holding its breath.