Flyers scratching their heads after Sabres' shocker
PHILADELPHIA -- In the hours leading up to what would be the Philadelphia Flyers' final game of the season, coach Ken Hitchcock said he was looking for heroes to step forward, to seize the moment.
There were heroes, to be sure. Unfortunately for Hitchcock and the Flyers, the heroes' names were Grier, Roy, Miller and Kotalik, and they wore the jersey of the Buffalo Sabres.
And when it was mercifully all over, the 7-1 drubbing Monday night, when the fans had hurled their last venomous "You guys suck!" at the departing home team, Hitchcock had the bewildered look of a man who had been through a hurricane or terrible accident.
"Shocked," he told a throng of reporters. "It was over so quick. It was bang, bang, bang. Everybody was in shock.
"The air went out completely. The deflation was unbelievable." Hitchcock added he'd never experienced a throttling like that in such a crucial situation.
The Sabres, winning their first playoff series since 2001, destroyed the more experienced Flyers with three goals in the last half of the first period. For all their talk about needing to start well in such a crucial game, the Flyers seemed powerless to stop the carnage.
By the time Derek Roy scored his first career playoff goal with 32.8 seconds left in the first period, left alone at the side of the Philadelphia net to deposit the rebound of a Mike Grier deflection that gave Buffalo a 3-0 lead, the sold-out Wachovia Center was deathly quiet.
"Definitely losing in the first round, there's nothing positive you can take out of that," Flyers forward Mike Knuble said. "That's probably the thing of being an athlete in Philadelphia, there are extremely high expectations. The city demands it, the fans demand it, the organization demands it. When you don't deliver, you question yourself as a player and what you could have done better and what you need to work on."
Indeed, it will be a long, hard summer of reflection for the entire Philadelphia organization.
This past fall, after GM Bob Clarke signed defensemen Mike Rathje and Derian Hatcher and acquired superstar center Peter Forsberg to go along with super-prospects Mike Richards and Jeff Carter, the Flyers seemed destined to be among the elite of the Eastern Conference.
It seems those expectations were for an entirely different team.
The Sabres, who outscored the Flyers 13-2 in the first periods of the series, revealed the Flyers as too old, too indecisive and built for a game that no longer exists.
On Buffalo's first goal Tuesday, veteran defenseman Eric Desjardins was stripped of the puck behind the Philadelphia goal by Roy, who fed it to Chris Drury. Drury slid it across to an uncovered Grier.
With less than three minutes to go in the first frame, Rathje was beaten to the puck by Jason Pominville, who fed Ales Kotalik at the circle. Kotalik beat netminder Robert Esche through the five hole.
"We were a lot more inconsistent than they were," Flyers defenseman Denis Gauthier said. "The bottom line is they were a lot more consistent in their game plan. They stuck to it a lot better."
By the time Pominville drilled a slap shot home 3:05 into the second period to finish off a three-on-one and make the score 4-1, the Sabres were barely celebrating -- as though they had already moved on, as though their mind-set was on their second-round opponents, the Ottawa Senators.
After the fifth goal, a two-on-one effort capped by Maxim Afinogenov, Hitchcock pulled starting netminder Esche. It was a mercy pull more than anything else. As Esche disappeared down the hallway, he threw down his stick in anger and humiliation. It was a sentiment that coursed deeply through the Philadelphia dressing room.
"Yeah, we had high hopes. And I came in here thinking I had a chance to win a Cup and I'm truly disappointed this is not happening," said Gauthier, whom the Flyers acquired at the trade deadline. "But we'll regroup here, we're going to stick together. We'll come back next year mad at what happened this year. It's going to be a bad and long summer, but we're going to come back hungry."
How bad were things Tuesday?
Well, until late in the second period, Philadelphia's two best scoring chances were delivered by lumbering Hatcher, who described the night as the most embarrassing of his career.
Praised at the beginning of the season for his moves, Clarke is now saddled with two defensemen, Hatcher and Rathje, who will eat up $7 million in cap room next season and who have been marginalized by the new NHL. Worse, in terms of Clarke's ability to move his team forward, Hatcher's contract extends three more years and Rathje's four, making them almost impossible to move.
Given the expected rise in the salary cap from $39 million to somewhere in the mid-40s and Flyers owner Ed Snider's willingness to spend money, the team will always be competitive. But the question now is, how long will it take for Clarke to correct the mistakes of this season?
As for Buffalo, the question entering the playoffs was whether the youthful Sabres could overcome their playoff naïveté. That question has given way to another, more interesting question: Just how good are these guys?
Even after dropping Games 3 and 4 in Philadelphia last week, blowing a 2-0 series lead in the process, the Sabres never got off-kilter, and it seemed the experience they were gaining from each game was somehow being multiplied by a factor of 10 or 100. By Tuesday, they were poised and deadly efficient, scoring seven times on 28 shots.
When the Flyers scored to make it 5-1 with 1:03 left in the second, the Sabres, as though to make a point, simply came back down the ice and Drury scored on yet another odd-man break to make it 6-1 with 13.9 seconds left in the period.
Daniel Briere said he thinks the crucial moment in the series was in Game 1, when Buffalo won in double overtime after Philadelphia came back to tie the score in regulation.
"I think that's when we went, 'Wow, we have something special,'" said Briere, who had an assist Tuesday and has nine points in the playoffs.
He credited coach Lindy Ruff for helping keep the team on an even keel after the series was tied at two games each.
"It would have been kind of easy to drop everything and let it go," Briere said.
Instead, the Sabres outscored the Flyers 10-1 in the final two games of the series.
"We took advantage of every break we got," Ruff said. "We made sure we got them down when we had the opportunity."
By the start of the third period, thousands upon thousands of Flyers fans, most clad in orange T-shirts and sporting orange cardboard hockey helmets, wandered off into the Philadelphia night to contemplate another spring without a championship, while the Sabres began to contemplate where their playoff road will lead them.
Scott Burnside is an NHL writer for ESPN.com.
