Too Close For Comfort

I'll never ever understand how on earth the Flyers can dominate teams like...Minnesota, New Jersey, Ottawa, Carolina and so on, but come close to losing to the fucking Islanders. Like I said earlier, Philadelphia's biggest Achilles Heel is and always has been inconsistency. 

The first period was pretty close to textbook Flyers hockey. Crisp puck movement, getting to loose pucks, winning the battles in the corners...basically everything you're supposed to do in professional hockey. But jesus christ did things go south after the start of the second period. Some of the sloppiest plays ever, turnovers galore and just generally looking like they were confused as to what the object of hockey was. Then the 3rd period rolled around and things started out just as horrible. Finally Zherdev fucked up royally and didn't pick up the trailing guy, I think it was Parenteau, who shot a beautifully placed one-timer past Bobo. Then like 36 seconds later the freakin' Isles scored again, definitely looked like a weak goal but the damn whistle blew before the puck crossed the line so it shouldn't have counted.

I gotta be honest, after that I seriously considered turning the game off. They were pissing me off so much, and what adds insult to injury is they were blowing a game to the fucking Islanders...a team the Phantoms (who are in last place in the AHL right now) could beat. But Lavy called a time-out so I figured I'd give them a few more minutes before I gave up on them for the day. Not too much later Noodle had a nice little tip to slide one past the old ass goaltender for the Isles. A few minutes later the H-B-L line did a nice bit of touch passing and second chance puck movement so Leino could make a beautiful pass to Danny B who buried it behind old fuck. They took a 3-2 lead and that's how it was stayin for the rest of the day, but seriously...it should have been so much better.

Ok, if you're feeling like taking a game off and not showing up, it might as well be against the Jersey Shore on skates...but seriously don't make it look like they'll actually beat you. Apart from just being plain old bad, 2 of their only 3 decent players are injured so it's not even like they have a single line that's dangerous. Come on, when Jon Sim is on your first powerplay unit, your team is pretty fuckin bad. A team like that has no business almost topping a team that has Zherdev playing the 4th line. They meet the Isles 6 times this season, that's a guaranteed 12 points on the season...they need to take care of business a little better. We all remember what happened last season, they blew the easy games in the beginning of the season and had to fight tooth and nail just to make the playoffs last year...let's not pull the same shit this year. 

Teams it's acceptable to lose to: Shittsburgh, Washington, Tampa, Detroit, San Jose, Vancouver and probably a couple others that I can't think of right now. Most of the rest of the league is either in rebuild mode, just straight up sucks, or they have 1 or 2 good players that basically carry the entire team..such as Lundqvist in NY or Cindy, Malkin and Fleury in Shittsburgh. And when you have to play Washington, Tampa, and Shittsburgh at least 4 times a year...you take advantage of all the give me games.

Let's not take away from the fact that they did win, and they did pick up the 4/4 points for the weekend regardless...they just didn't do it in the way that they are capable of. They better show up ready to play on Wednesday or it's gonna be a long long night