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The Flyers Need to Shoooooooooooot the Puck
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They say that you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, and in the Flyers’ case, they’re not shooting much to begin with.
They’ve lost two games in a row, both at home, falling to the Leafs 5-2 on Saturday and Flames 2-1 on Sunday. They mustered 33 shots against Toronto but just 18 against Calgary and are now dead last in shots on goal per game:
Ranked 32nd out of 32 teams with 23.5 shots on goal per game, and the related numbers don’t help much.
When you add missed and blocked shots to the equation, the number is 50.8, which is second-worst in the league. They have a -3.1 shot on goal differential per game, which is 26th. That’s bottom eight but shows that the Flyers do a decent job of limiting opponent opportunities at the same time. The power play numbers are similarly low, with the Flyers only getting off 1.24 shots on goal each time they go on the Pecooooooooo power play.
This was a thing that Flyers fans were worried about when Rick Tocchet was hired. His teams have been historically bad in this category, and there was a graphic making the rounds on social media the other night showing that his last two Vancouver teams ranked 31st and 26th in the league with 25.5 and 28.4 shots on goal, respectively. His first Canuck team was 22nd, with 29.7 shots on goal per game, and the four Phoenix teams only twice finished above 30 SOGs per game.
Tocchet spoke the other night about getting pucks to the net with bodies in front. Hard ice vs. easy ice. He talked about players “passing it off” and suggested they’d need to hammer net front drills in their next practices, and maybe that solves the problem, or maybe not! It’s one thing to install a certain play style, but another thing to consider if the players fit the style. Is this a round hole and square peg type of thing? Do we want skill guys playing a 200-foot game? Is it 200 feet, or 100 points for a guy like Matvei Michkov? These are the questions we’re going to be asking and hopefully answering over the next month or two. We’re 12 games in and learning more every day!
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com