Konecny Aims to Regain All-Star Form
There are already 10 veteran Flyers players who have been working out at the team's training center in Voorhees, a few weeks ahead of the start of NHL training camp.
The 2021 offseason has been one that Konecny will remember for the rest of his life. On Aug. 14, his fiancée, Karly, gave birth to the couple's first child; a healthy baby boy named Rhett James Konecny. For any new parent, that's a life-altering event.
Come October 15, by the time the puck drops on opening night of the regular season against the Vancouver Canucks, it will be 158 days since Flyers ended the 2020-21 regular season with a pyrrhic 4-2 home win against the New Jersey Devils. There are only two ways that a team's season can end in a win. One is to capture the Stanley Cup. The other is to miss the playoffs but win the final game of the regular season.
The lengthy break between games can only serve to benefit the 24-year-old Konecny. The 2020 Stanley Cup Playoffs and the pandemic-delayed and shortened 2020-21 regular season did not go his way.
A first-time NHL All-Star Game participant and the Flyers' leading regular season scorer in 2019-20, Konecny had scored 24 goals in three straight seasons heading into this past season.
Konecny had a hard time during the 2020 Stanley Cup playoffs in the Bubble in Toronto in attempting to pick up where he left off at the time of the leaguewide pause. He went goalless with seven assists in 16 postseason games. Unfortunately, Konecny followed it up with a somewhat disappointing 2020-21 season by his standards.
The winger who was one of the Flyers' players who missed time in February due to a bout with COVID-19 and had been a one-game healthy scratch in late January, dressed in 50 of 56 games. He posted 11 goals and 34 points during the season, with just seven tallies coming at even strength.
"I wish I could tell you, or I would have fixed it. don't know what caused it," Konecny of his goal-scoring issues in May during his Exit Day media availability.
"This season was weird in general. If you had any sort of issues in your game, it was hard to work on certain things and get back to where you need to be because there was no practice time to reset and maybe get your confidence back. Other than that, maybe I wasn't shooting the puck as much as I was last year. Trying to do too much. Maybe just back to simplifying my game. But, I mean, I'm going to have some time to reflect on that and hopefully figure it out during the offseason."
That was said back in May. By late summer, it appears, the player had turned the page and was looking forward to what lay ahead rather than dwelling on what went wrong for him in the 2020 playoffs and the 2020-21 regular season.
When Konecny is at his best, he buzzes around the net, hounds the puck on the forecheck and is an irritating, pesky presence that gets under opponents' skin. He is less effective when he plays along the perimeter and settles for shots above and outside the the right faceoff dot.
From a puck possession analytics standpoint, Konecny had a solid 2020-21 season with a 55.1 percent Corsi at even strength (55.6 percent in 2019-20) and he also cut down on his turnovers (15 charged giveaways in 50 games after being charged with 47 giveaways in 66 games in 2019-20. This is a double-edged sword, however.
While he was turning over fewer pucks this past season, Konecny was also less assertive and creative with the puck than he was previously. He was less inclined to shoot the puck during the 2020-21 season than in prior seasons. He'd had a rather rough 2020 playoffs in terms of turnovers (11 charged giveaways in 16 games, combined with his scoring difficulties) and seemed a little gun-shy at times this past year.
Konecny was something of a defensive liability his first couple seasons after his initial arrival the NHL. He worked to improve in areas such as decision-making with the puck in the danger-zones of the ice, weak-side coverages in his own end and not leaving the defensive zone too early. While he'll likely never be a Selke Trophy candidate or part of a penalty killing rotation, Konecny has generally become at least an adequate two-way player.
Don't completely discount the Covid-factor with Konecny, although it does not entirely explain why his goal scoring touch vanished in the Bubble months earlier.
Konecny got off to a quick start offensively this past season. After an opening night assist (Konecny was initially credited with the goal from the lower slot, but the puck glanced off Oskar Lindblom's helmet on the way to the net), Konecny had a hat trick in the season's second game. He went on to post a total of five goals and eight points through the first seven games of the 2020-21 season.
In terms of Konecny's two-way game, Flyers coach Alain Vigneault was not happy with what he saw from the player early in the season and felt that the player had taken a backward step. Konecy was a surprise healthy scratch in the Flyers' 3-2 overtime home win against the Islanders on January 30. He was back in the lineup one night later for a 4-3 overtime victory in a return match with the Islanders at the Wells Fargo Center.
Konecny's overall game picked up but he was in a mini-slump offensively -- but his overall play was within the normal ups and downs of a season -- at the time he came down with COVID and placed in protocol on Feb. 14. Although the player never wanted to use the illness as an excuse, there was a downturn in his energy level and effectiveness when he came back.
"I did have symptoms. It's no joke, it's a serious virus.... I got it pretty good," Konecny said on March 2. "With my girlfriend being pregnant, I spent a lot of my time just in my room by myself. It was a long quarantine for me. I spent a lot of time just texting, trying to FaceTime and stay in touch with guys. Playing Xbox."
The month of March was a disaster for the Flyers team as a whole and a tough time individually for Konency. Over the 17 games the club played that month, Konecny was held pointless in nine of them while tallying just two goals and a pair of multi-assist games. Tellingly, there were only four games all month in which Konecny registered more than two shots on goal.
After the Flyers finally had a mini-break in the schedule in which they got in both rest time and some desperately needed practice, Konecny's effectiveness markedly picked up again in April when the schedule resumed on the 3rd. He opened the month with a five-game point streak (two goals, seven points) and registered a combined 17 shots on goal in that span. Konecny was also noticeably feistier.
The remainder of the season was rather uneven -- again, for the team as a whole as well as Konecny individually -- but he was trending the right way again as the season wound down. Over the final seven games, Konecny had five points (2g, 3a).
