Just looking at the 5-2 score of Saturday’s loss to the Red Wings doesn’t really tell the full story. The Flyers played well at even strength, and all three of their defensive pairings played pretty well.
Braydon Coburn and Nicklas Grossmann were the only pairing that didn’t finish with a positive Corsi percentage — or, in other words, the only pairing that allowed more shots towards Ray Emery’s net than they helped generate towards Jimmy Howard’s net. That’s expected, though, since Grossmann and Coburn were mostly tasked with stopping Pavel Datsyuk, Henrik Zetterberg and Todd Bertuzzi. That’s a group you can only hope to contain.
The other two pairings — Kimmo Timonen and Erik Gustafsson, Luke Schenn and Mark Streit — also acquitted themselves nicely. Only one of Detroit’s five goals in the game came at five-on-five, and well… like we said, it’s not easy stopping Zetterberg and Datsyuk.
It’s no surprise, then, that Craig Berube will apparently keep things the same for Tuesday’s game against the Vancouver Canucks. At practice on Monday, the pairings were exactly the same as we saw in-game on Saturday, meaning Andrej Meszaros and Hal Gill will remain the healthy scratches against the Canucks.
Vancouver’s gotten off to a slow start as well, and they come to Philly carrying a 3-3 record. They’re coming off a 4-1 loss to Montreal on Saturday in which they set the bar for the most ridiculous own goal of the year.
