Wrapping up a three-game road trip, John Tortorella's Philadelphia Flyers (5-8-1) are in Sunrise on Saturday to take on Paul Maurice's defending Stanley Cup champion Florida Panthers (10-3-1). Game time at Amerant Arena is 6:00 p.m. EST.
The game will be televised on NBCSP. The radio broadcast is on 97.5 The Fanatic with an online simulcast on Flyers Radio 24/7.
This is the first of three meetings between the teams this season and the lone game in Sunrise. The Flyers and Panthers will rematch at Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia on the evenings of Dec. 5 and Jan. 13.
The Flyers enter Saturday's game coming off a 2-1 (2-0) shootout win over the Lightning in Tampa Bay on Thursday. Owen Tippett scored the Flyers' lone goal in regulation, assisted by Travis Konecny. Konecny and Tippett also converted their attempts in the shootout. Starting due to a lower-body injury sustained earlier in the day by Aleksei Kolosov, Ivan Fedotov earned his first NHL victory (23 saves on 24 shots, 2-for-2 in the shootout).
Here are five things to watch in Saturday's game.
1. TK and Tipp
Even as the Flyers collectively have struggled to score goals over the first 14 games of the regular season, Konecny has posted 15 points (seven goals, eight assists) and three multi-point performances.
The current road trip started with Konecny having a hand in all four Flyers tallies (2g, 2a) in a 6-4 loss to the Carolina Hurricanes. He followed it up with an assist and the shootout winner in Tampa.
Tippett was trending the right way in his offensive play even before the Tampa game. His late third period tying goal against the Lightning was a backhand snipe over Andrei Vasilevskiy.
Now with nine points on the season (3g, 6a) with goals in back-to-back games, Tippett has notched eight points over the Flyers last eight matches. A streaky scorer, Tippett has shown an ability to rack up goals when he gets hot.
2. Farabee's followup
Joel Farabee did not record a point in the Tampa game but was arguably the Flyers' most effective forward on a shift-in and shift-out basis during that game. He was around the puck all game, played with a lot of energy, and was in the thick of five scoring chances. Farabee also took a forward step during portions of the previous game in Raleigh.
Consequently, Farabee has seen his ice time increase during the current road trip to 15:27 TOI against Carolina and 16:36 versus the Lightning. If he can build on the Tampa game in particular, it would not be at all surprising if Farabee starts putting a few pucks in the net.
Farabee started out the season with points in each of the first three games. He had another three-game point streak from Oct. 27 to Oct. 31 (empty net goal in Boston, two assists).
3. Five-man-unit cohesion
Five-on-five play has been a sore spot for the majority of the season to date. There were many different aspects that needed improvement in October and even entering into the current month's road trip.
Step one of the process to getting on the right track at five-on-five was to re-establish structure in the defensive zone, especially in terms of taking away the middle of the ice. That has largely been accomplished over the last couple weeks.
Step two: spend more time attacking and much less time hemmed in the defensive zone. This entails improved breakouts and transitional play, better puck support (including the F3 rotating high to cover for a pinch by a defenseman), moving up the ice as five-man units, winning more 50-50 puck battles, and getting more attackers to the net.
Getting these aspects of the process to fall in place consistently is still very much a work in progress for the Flyers. So is the need to convert more of the bonafide scoring opportunities that arise from "playing the right way".
Apart from gaining a desperately needed win in the Tampa game, the most encouraging aspected of the game was that the attack looked more cohesive moving up the ice. The Flyers had the better of the territorial play overall against the Lightning.
It's a start. Now the test is to make further progress in a game against the defending Cup champions (and back-to-back defending Eastern Conference champs).
4. Balanced scoring, Torts' non-negotiatiables
The Flyers have received a decent rate of goal production from the back end so far this season. Travis Sanheim has effectively helped out in joining the attack and produced three goals among his six points.
Overall, the Flyers have gotten eight goals from the defense corps. This includes two goals from Cam York and one apiece from Jamie Drysdale, Rasmus Ristolainen and Nick Seeler.
Drysdale (1g, 2a) is capable of jumping into many more plays than he has so far. Part of what's needed are aforementioned team issues: more puck possession in the attack zone, better support up high, etc. The other part is for Drysdale himself to be a little more assertive in using his mobility and skill to participate regularly in the offense.
Overall, though, the Flyers defensemen have chipped in a respectable amount of goal support. There is no sugar coating the fact that the Flyers need more goals from their forward corps beyond Konecny.
Tippett is heating up, but needs to improve his pace of three goals through 14 games. All three of Sean Couturier's goals on the season came in a single game against Minnesota.
Farabee has one non empty-net goal so far. Tyson Foerster has one power play tally and one five-on-five goal. Morgan Frost has but a single goal (5-on-5 in Carolina) on the season, and only one of the playmaking center's five assists has come at 5-on-5.
Bottom line: The Flyers are still trying to achieve balanced scoring and to get the off-puck and with-the-puck sides of a 200-foot approach in sync.
Nineteen-year-old rookie Matvei Michkov has 10 points on the season (4g, 6a), to rank second among NHL rookies in points; speedy playmaking Dallas Stars winger Logan Stankoven has 10 assists among a dozen points. Michkov has been effective on the power play with seven power play points plus a goal scored on a delayed penalty. It's his 5-on-5 positional awareness that's in need of refinement.
Michkov was scratched from the lineup in Tampa. Another offensively skilled winger, Bobby Brink (2g, 3a in 11 games) had three consecutive DND games back in October due to checking/defensive awareness concerns. Puck support and tracking back are teamwide non-negotiables in Tortorella's systems.
5 Behind enemy lines: Florida Panthers
The Flyers current road trip has been book-ended by games against scorching hot opponents: Carolina (now riding an eight-game winning streak) and the Panthers (six straight wins, points in nine of their last 10 games), sandwiched around Thursday's game against the recently scuffling Lightning.
Not even a round-trip to Finland over the past week has slowed down the Panthers. Florida swept the two-game Global Series in Tampere against the Dallas Stars (themselves a legitimate Cup contender) last weekend. Returning home to the Sunshine State, the Panthers mauled the Predators, 6-2, on Thursday.
Florida already has a half-dozen players who've compiled 10 or more points, led by Sam Bennett's 22 points (11g, 11a). Meanwhile, defenseman Gustav Forsling is off to another strong start with eight points (3g, 5a) and a traditional +11 rating.
These feats have been accomplished despite elite two-way center Aleksander Barkov (11 points) being limited to six games this season due to a lower-body injury and Matthew Tkachuk (10 points) playing just nine of the club's 14 games due to an illness. Both Barkov and Tkachuk have since returned, which has contributed to the Panthers' current winning streak.
The Panthers are a team that can win games in a variety of different ways. In general, though, Florida is a club that doesn't mind trading off scoring chances because they'll simply overpower most opponents with superior depth as well as their top-end weaponry.
In goal, veteran star Sergei Bobrovsky (7-2-1, 2.97 GAA, .891 save percentage) has started 10 of the 14 games to date. Spencer Knight, now 23 years old after being drafted in the first round in 2019, has made four starts and one relief appearance (3-1-0, 2.79 GAA, .902 SV%).
