Frost scores shootout winner for Flyers in season opener against Canucks

VANCOUVER -- Morgan Frost scored the decisive goal for the Philadelphia Flyers in the fifth round of the shootout in a 3-2 win against the Vancouver Canucks at Rogers Arena on Friday.

Frost skated in slowly from the left side before firing a close-range wrist shot up and over the glove of Kevin Lankinen.

“Kind of done that one a few times before, just going in pretty slow and on a weird angle and trying to freeze him, and just trying to pick my spot,” Frost said. “Luckily, it went in. Definitely made a few mistakes out there, and [one] penalty that I'd like to have back, so to get the shootout winner feels good.”

Cam York and Tyson Foerster scored in regulation, and Samuel Ersson made 24 saves for the Flyers (1-0-0), who were playing their first game of the season.

Ersson saved 11 of 12 in the first period, including going cross-crease to glove a Brock Boeser backdoor chance on one of two early Canucks power plays.

“That's what I thought the key of the game was, [Ersson] just giving us a chance to get our legs,” coach John Tortorella said. “We started well but when we took the back-to-back penalties, it knocked us back. Settled down in the second, neither team developed much. In the third period we played well. We find a way.”

Teddy Blueger and Nils Hoglander scored and Lankinen made 29 saves in his first start with the Canucks (0-0-2).

Vancouver has lost its first two games of the season after regulation, dropping the opener to the Calgary Flames 6-5 in overtime on Wednesday. The Canucks were 42-1-4 when leading after two periods last season but have surrendered third-period leads in both games so far.

“It could have been 2-0, 3-0 after the first,” coach Rick Tocchet said. “We let the Flyers hang around and they made the play at the end.”

Vancouver played most of the game with five defensemen after Tyler Myers was injured making a hit on Joel Farabee along the right boards 1:46 into the game. Myers, 34, didn’t put any weight on his right leg as he was helped off the ice.

Tocchet did not have an update on Myers' status after the game.

“Hopefully we dodged a bullet, but I’m not sure,” Tocchet said.

The Canucks went ahead 1-0 at 12:55 of the first period after Conor Garland intercepted a pass inside the Flyers blue line and quickly passed it down to Hoglander for a wrist shot over Ersson’s blocker from just above the left dot.

Philadelphia tied it 1-1 with a pretty passing sequence off the rush on the power play at 17:24. Bobby Brink passed cross-ice to Farabee at the top of the left circle and he one-touched it down low to Foerster on the other side for a tap-in with Lankinen caught moving the other way.

“I think the biggest thing with the power play is you're just trying to create momentum, whether you score or not,” Farabee said. “Obviously nice to get the one goal early … for the first game of the year, I think it looked pretty good.”

Blueger put Vancouver ahead 2-1 at 11:25 of the second period, passing off the right boards back to defenseman Derek Forbort at the left point, then going to the net to redirect a backdoor return pass from Forbort past a stranded Ersson.

“Something we’ve been working on in practice, going high-low and beating the guy to the corner,” Forbort said. "So just kind of had a feeling he’d be there.”

York tied it 2-2 at 2:48 of the third period with a quick wrist shot that went over the glove of Lankinen and in off the post from the left face-off dot after a cross-ice pass up from Ryan Poehling below the goal line.

Tocchet praised his remaining five defensemen for how they handled extra minutes and unsettled pairings, but the Flyers tried to make it hard on them.

“We just wanted to grind them out,” Farabee said. “Obviously, they went down to 5 D pretty early and we kind of knew that, so we really just wanted to grind them out down low, tire them out and obviously, [York] comes up with a big goal there, to tie it up and [Ersson] just locked it down from there.”

NOTES: Two Flyers forwards made their NHL debut. Matvei Michkov, a 19-year-old picked No. 7 in the 2023 NHL Draft, had five shots, one blocked shot and one penalty in 18:32 of ice time. Jett Luchanko, an 18-year-old selected No. 13 in the 2024 NHL Draft, played 14:36, finishing minus-1 after losing Blueger on his goal and with one rebound shot that forced Lankinen to make a sprawling save. … Vancouver defenseman Quinn Hughes played a game high 31:29, more than five and a half minutes more than any other player in the game, for either team. … Lankinen was a late addition to the Canucks, signing a one-year, $875,000 contract as a free agent on Sept. 21.