Kolosov Watch

With Sam Ersson remaining out with injury — though perhaps not for much longer — this means a greater opportunity is open for Aleksei Kolosov to get some meaningful minutes and prove his deservedness to be an NHL regular. He’s still chipping away at it, but this was another pretty solid showing for him. He performed just about to the expected level in this one — Chicago generated 2.02 Expected Goals across all situations, and two is what Kolosov allowed in. The eye test gives us a similarly somewhat mixed impression as well — on the one hand, Kolosov did come up with some big and much needed saves, but he did also get caught cheating, leaning, on the play that led to the Blackhawks’ second goal of the game.

All in all, while it wasn’t a perfect showing for him, it was enough to lock things down and keep them in the game long enough for the forwards to really get going. Could he have done a little more? Sure. But what he gave them in this one was enough in the end.

The shutdown game comes through

There were a number of things we were hoping to see the Flyers accomplish in this game, and while many of them are pretty self-focused, we’d be lying if we said shutting down Connor Bedard wasn’t towards the top of that list. So how did they do, to that aim?

All in all, pretty well. The Blackhawks got the better of play on the whole when Bedard was on the ice — 53.7 percent of the share of shot attempts and 57.07 percent of the Expected Goals (score adjusted) — but they were held off the board, still. On an individual level, Bedard was able to get off five shot attempts across all situations, but none of them made it on net. So it was something of a bend but don’t break effort as it relates to defending Bedard, and it was enough to get the job done in this one.

A note on resilience

This was a bit of a frustrating watch for a good portion of this game. The Flyers came out with good jump, better than Chicago, and were getting the better of the chances as well, but just couldn’t seem to get anything past Mrazek. Truly, it felt like there was nothing more they could be doing to get themselves into good scoring chances, but nothing was going for them.

This was a good test for the team, though. A less resilient group would have begun to seriously deflate, to let their level of play slip, and to allow things to snowball on them when they got down in the first place. But this game saw them sticking to their game plan, bearing down nicely, and just keep chipping away at it until their luck began to turn. There’s still a lot of work that needs to be done, a lot of ground that needs to be covered to get the team where they need to be, but this is the kind of effort and compete level that the coaching staff will surely be impressed by.