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Flyers vs. Mammoth Was One of the Worst Hockey Games Ever
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UGLY hockey at the barn on Thursday night, just a complete abomination of an NHL game. No doubt, it was lowlighted by this Flyers power play sequence in which Dan Vladar had to put on his Reed Blankenship hat and play single-high safety:
Final score: Utah Mammoth 3, Philadelphia Flyers 0. The three-game winning streak came to end, leaving them six points out of a Wild Card spot with 21 games to play.
Said Rick Tocchet afterward:
“I think the first 10 (minutes) dictated our (overall play) – we were soft, our execution was tough. We had three to four 4 on 2s, a couple of chances, but I don’t know. I think Tip (Owen Tippett) was the only guy who had some juice tonight. It’s one of those games where you have a tough time saying who had a good game… And no disrespect to Utah, I didn’t think they were that great either, to be honest. We gave them a couple of breakaways but it was one of those games where we didn’t push back. Tough to swallow. Gotta regroup.”
It took the Flyers half a period before they could even receive a pass properly. They were mishandling everything, no rhythm, nothing. They were struggling to just move the puck, get it off the boards, and connect a few passes. Utah opened the scoring with a really nice goal in the 2nd, a tight-angle one-timer that fooled everybody, but the second Mammoth goal was hideous:
Travis Sanheim loses the puck on a wraparound, Rasmus Ristolainen is flat-footed at the blue line, and then Matvei Michkov is just sort of coasting, defending nobody and nothing, so Clayton Keller glides in there and scores. It looked like the Kelee Ringo play from Week 18 when he decided to guard nobody in the end zone and let Josh Johnson walk right in.
Whatever you think about Michkov playing on the left, or his fitness, his relationship with Tocchet, his diet, whatever – it’s inarguable that the guy has to have some kind of defensive awareness, that a broken transitional play requires you to crash hard on the puck and do whatever you have to do to break up the play. He’s defending empty ice and the Flyers concede a goal in a 2v3 situation and that’s comical.
Maybe these guys were distracted by the trade deadline, maybe they just had an off night, but there was zero jam in the building. It looked like a preseason game for the first 10 minutes. They finished with 16 shots on home ice, went 0-3 on the power play (nothing new), and certainly did not look like they were seeking their first four-game winning streak since 2024.
Sell sell sell!
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