The camera broadcasting over the scoreboard focused in on Owen Tippett on the bench. The crowd rapidly grew louder.
The Flyers were down, again, and they dug out of the hole, again, with Tippett scoring twice within seconds to do it.
Three minutes into the second period, the Flyers were down three goals. 37 minutes later, they still left the ice at the Wells Fargo Center with a loss to the visiting Florida Panthers, 7-5, on Monday night, but not until they put up a major fight and took fans on a rollercoaster ride in the process.
Trailing against the defending Stanley Cup champions at that big of a deficit, no one would’ve batted an eye had a young and developing team like this completely lost a grip.
But they fought. They stayed with it, even if the effort came up short in the end and broke a hard-earned three-game win streak.
“I loved our ability to stay with it and find a way,” said associate coach Brad Shaw postgame, who spoke to the media in place of head coach John Tortorella postgame. “To take that game and get it to 5-4, that’s a great sign. The fact that we don’t finish it off, that’s something we have to work on.
“That’s part of being a team that’s not quite down the path as far as we’d like to be as a group.”
Tyson Foerster cleaned up a loose puck on the power play, Nick Seeler jumped in front of a Florida pass from off the wall then fired a laser over Spencer Knight’s shoulder, and after Florida answered with their own power-play tally by Carter Verhaege from in close, the line of Tippett, Morgan Frost, and Matvei Michkov took over.
Tippett checked down into the offensive zone on a Florida defense looking to break out. He blocked the pass, Panthers defenseman Aaron Ekblad lost the bouncing puck in his feet, and Michkov was there to pick it up in the high slot.
The rookie fed the puck straight back to Tippett, who slipped down below the left faceoff dot, and the shot went off the stick so quickly that Knight had next to no time to register it as it blew past him. One-goal game.
Alexei Kolosov, who replaced Ivan Fedotov as the night’s starting goaltender from the second onward, made a pivotal stop on a Tomas Nosek break to hold the line, giving Michkov the time to catch up and sail the puck out their end, with Tippett there along the neutral zone boards to carry it forward. He was knocked down to the ice though, possession flipped back to Florida, but on their own clear, Michkov rushed and then jumped up to bat the puck down and keep it going downhill.
Tippett recovered, the two crashed in toward the net along with Frost, Tippett had the puck again and tried to get it to his center. The pass bounced off a defender’s leg and right back to Tippett’s stick instead with momentum carrying him across the crease.
So he put the shot away. Tie game, to the sound of an arena that erupted, then, as the last few ticks came off the clock before the intermission, to a crowd on its feet applauding and cheering for a team that finally found its break and ran with it.
A few minutes into the third, they took their lead. The Flyers’ checking line of Hathaway, Ryan Poehling, and Scott Laughton threw a quick shot on goal then crashed down. They all hacked and jammed away for a loose puck in the crease as Knight and the Panthers tried to scramble after it and freeze it.
Hathaway flipped to his backhand and found it first, with an open net to guide the puck straight into. The Flyers went up, 5-4. All the momentum was on their side, but they had to sustain it for about 15 more minutes.
Tippett got sent on a breakaway with a chance at the hat trick, but couldn’t bury it, and the Flyers took the edge in shots for the period 12-5 with 2:28 left.
But a clean point shot through traffic from Gustav Forsling tied it at five to keep Florida alive.
Play bounced back and forth as the third wore on, tempers tilted, and the hits got harder.
Travis Sanheim got knocked down in the corner by Sam Bennett late. Joel Farabee took exception, retaliating at Bennett then dropping the gloves for a fight with Forsling. He got tagged for cross-checking and roughing to put the Panthers back on the power play, and it cost the Flyers.
Chaos in front of Kolosov just shy of 30 seconds into the man advantage left Sam Reinhart out wide all alone. The puck kicked out to him, and on the shot, he didn’t miss to put the Panthers back up 6-5 with only 1:59 left to play.
Then, with the empty net from the Flyers going for the extra attacker short on time, Matthew Tkachuk put the game away.
“To me, that’s the heat of the moment,” Shaw said of the Farabee penalty that went on to set the team back. “He’s doing what he thinks is best for the team and for his teammates. I’ve got no problem with what Joel Farabee does. That’s part of the game.”
But it all happened in a bad spot, at a bad time.
The Flyers went aggressive against Florida from the opening draw, and it gave them their looks, but caught them more than a few times, too.
Farabee, skating at the top of the lineup with Sean Couturier and Travis Konecny, got sprung up the ice on a poke check from Konecny along the wall just over a minute in. He was able to give chase and collect the puck on the way into the offensive zone, making a slick move to drag the puck past Florida’s Carter Verhaeghe on the cut inside toward the net. Farabee just ran out of real estate by the time he got there, with Knight having sealed off the post to leave only the outside of the net to shoot at.
Farabee hasn’t scored a goal since Nov. 9, despite generating some solid chances over the past couple of weeks.
Egor Zamula made a great sweep at the offensive blue line with the Panthers trying to break out their zone, knocking the puck back in toward the slot, which Bobby Brink wheeled around on to take a direct shot on net. Knight was just square to the puck already and set to glove it.
The Flyers kept the pressure on, but an offensive zone cycle fell apart quickly after. A Seeler shot from up top sailed wide and wrapped around the weak-side corner, taking hops past a pinching Zamula and then Brink along the wall as sticks clashed after the puck. Florida’s Evan Rodrigues tracked it through the chaos then poked it around Tyson Foerster to send the play the other way. Foerster tripped trying to steer the puck out of trouble, Rodrigues corraled it and dragged it back inside heading toward the crease, then tucked it past Ivan Fedotov to make it a 1-0 game.
Panthers defenseman Niko Mikkola made it 2-0 a few minutes later. Tkachuk stepped in the way of a puck rolling behind the Flyers’ net, and with plenty of space to work with, waited and slipped the pass he wanted out to Mikkola at the top of the circle, who then blasted a shot bardown.
The Flyers took the game’s first power play past the halfway mark of the period when Tippett made a move that tied up Aaron Ekblad at the offensive blue line and left him flailing his stick for the tipping call. The Flyers couldn’t find their opening with it.
The Tippett line generated a couple of dangerous chances in the last chunk of the first, but Frost took his shot on a setup that went under Knight’s pads and out the opposite side along the goal line, followed by Michkov getting hold of a pass too late by the far post that Knight had enough time to get over and cover.
Toward the end of the period, Konecny took a hit up high to the jaw from Sam Bennett that left him down on one knee and slow to get back to the bench as play continued. There was no call, and as the Flyers were readying to come back out for the second, Tortorella stormed down the tunnel and past his team straight to the bench, signaling to an official for a word.
Tortorella opting not to speak postgame was only made known to the media once Shaw stepped to the podium to field questions instead.
Aleksander Barkov scored a few minutes into the second on the man advantage, on a sequence where the Flyers’ penalty kill broke down, creating that initial 3-0 hole.
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(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
