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Philadelphia-New Jersey series

Flyers Go OT For Game 1 Win

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Philly-New Jersey was the last of the NHL’s four conference semi-final series to swing into action on Sunday, but the Flyers and Devils made it worth the wait, going into overtime and requiring the puck to find the back of the net not once, but twice in the extra session. TheSportsNotebook recaps Sunday’s games and looks ahead to Monday…

Philadelphia 4 New Jersey 3 (OT): The Devils got off to a good start when two players that need to be involved teamed up on a goal, as Zach Parise took a pass from Patrick Elias. Incidentally, I have to know if I’m the only person, who, whenever I hear of an “Elias” in the Jersey/Big Apple area thinks of the fictional mob boss in Person Of Interest. There are more nuances in his story than there is in this series. Back on the hockey rink, Philly opened up in the second, including a goal by Danny Briere, and got out to a 2-1 lead. Parise and Ilya Kovalchuk then fed Travis Zajac to tie the game. Again, a positive for the New Jersey offense as more players that are critical to their attack are showing up ready to go.

What wasn’t a positive for the Devils, is that their team defense lost what’s going to be a great series-long battle with the Flyers’ offense. Philadelphia got 36 shots on goal, and including seven in less than five minutes of overtime play. Goalie Martin Brodeur will not stand up to that kind of heat, and eventually he broke here. Center Claude Giroux scored on a power play in the third period, although the Devils were able to tie it 3-3. The NJ offense wasn’t great, getting 26 shots, but that’s enough to get you three goals a game against mediocre Flyer goalie Ilya Bryzgalov. In the OT session, Briere scored what looked to be the game-winner, until replays showed he kicked it into the net. Undeterred, Briere calmly did it again minutes later and Philly had Game 1 in hand.

I picked New Jersey to win this series and if they continue to get this kind of offensive involvement from Parise, Kovalchuk, Elias and Zajac, I think they’ll figure their defense out. But the Flyer offense showed they won’t pull a Vancouver and slink quietly into the night.

Phoenix 5 Nashville 3: The Coyote coaches and players called this their best performance of the playoffs, and they are absolutely right. Playing against a very good defensive team and an even better goalie, Phoenix attacked the net, got 39 shots and was able to finish, overcoming an uncharacteristically mediocre showing from their own goalie Mike Smith. But at some point in these playoffs, the ‘Yotes were going to need a win that didn’t come on Smith’s back. Antoine Vermette scored an early goal, and then Phoenix broke open a 1-1 tie with three goals in the second period. Offensive key Radim Vrbata scored and had an assist, while veteran Shane Doan scored. Nashville got some offensive involvement from Ryan Suter, who scored in the second period to keep it close at 3-2 and scored again in the third to cut the lead to 4-3. But Doan—whose last name is pronounced “Don” and has been dubbed “Doan Of The Desert” by Grantland’s hockey writer Katie Baker, scored again and we had the 5-3 final. If this was. Nashville has played two lackluster hockey games to start the series. Perhaps a return home for Games 3 & 4 will alert them that their situation is getting dire in a hurry. This is the one series with two games in, and Phoenix is halfway home.

Tonight’s it’s Washington-NY Rangers and LA Kings-St. Louis. TheSportsNotebook has stressed offensive involvement from key players, even when they aren’t scoring and both the Caps, with Alex Ovechkin and the Rangers, with Marian Gaborik, have players who need to get active. The Kings-Blues is the more defensive-oriented series and I’m just looking for the favorite Blues to play more cohesive defense in a series where there is no margin for error.

NHL 2nd Round Preview: New Jersey-Philadelphia

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The I-295 Interstate that connects New Jersey and Philadelphia will anything but the road less traveled over the coming week-plus. The Devils and the Flyers are set to tangle in the NHL’s Eastern Conference semi-finals and TheSportsNotebook previews the coming Border War…

Philadelphia has home-ice advantage, holding the #5 seed, while New Jersey is #6. The Flyers are the more rested team, having closed their series win over Pittsburgh out last Sunday while New Jersey went to double overtime just last night to win Game 7 in Florida. But while the Flyers may have been the one Eastern Conference semifinalist not to go the distance to win its opener, they were anything but impressive.

Goaltending problems are not new in Philly, but now that they don’t have Pittsburgh’s Marc-Andre Fleury to beat up on, the Flyers are left with the reality that their own netminder, Ilya Bryzgalov, was woeful in the first-round series, as Philly and Pittsburgh played what was easily the worst defense in the postseason. Furthermore, Philadelphia did not execute well in the five-on-five game, relying instead on hammering the Pens with power plays. The negative to this is that’s not going to work against New Jersey, a team whose penalty kill is among the league’s best. The positive is that the Flyers’ poor play in 5-on-5 is a departure from an area that was a team strength all year along. Perhaps it was just a one-series aberration.

One area the favorites have no problems in is scoring goals, an area that holds a substantial edge over their rivals. Philly’s offense was the second-best in the NHL during the season, while Jersey was in the middle of the pack. The Flyers do a proportionately excellent job at shot generation, while the Devils are terrible in this area. With center Claude Giroux being one of the game’s best passing centers, and Scott Hartnell and Jaromir Jagr on the wings, Philadelphia will challenge a New Jersey defense that is equally strong at stopping shots.

New Jersey goalie Martin Brodeur was heroic in his team’s Game 7 win over Florida, but the Devils’ defense must return to more of its regular season form against Philadelphia. Stopping 40-plus shots against a weak Florida frontline is one thing. Doing it against a Giroux-led attack is quite another. The Devils were one of the league’s better defensive teams because they were precisely that—a team—and they will need to be again if they’re going to stop this offense.

I don’t pick bad defensive teams to win at this level of the playoffs in any sport, much less the NHL. So I’m picking New Jersey to win this series, but if they’re going to take advantage of Philly’s lousy goaltending situation they need to stay on the attack.

The Devils’ have capable scorers. Ilya Kovalchuk and Zach Parise are the most noteworthy and the ones I mentioned most frequently through the first round, but we can also include David Clarkson, Adam Henrique and Petr Sykford as nice supporting pieces. The Flyer defense around the net is not bad—they are in the league’s upper third in preventing shots and certainly you can’t beat a goalie if you’re not attacking him. There were too many instances where New Jersey’s key people seemed to float in and out of the Florida series and they were fortunate to escape. I think they come out more consistent this time and win the series in six games, but if there’s any letup, the Flyers have the talent to exploit what the Panthers couldn’t.