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Laviolette on struggling Flyers: “I’m not ready to paint such a negative picture”

Peter Laviolette

Philadelphia Flyers head coach Peter Laviolette looks on in the first period of a preseason NHL hockey game with the Detroit Red Wings, Friday, Sept. 23, 2011, in Detroit. (AP Photo/Tony Ding)

AP

With just three wins in their last 10 games, the Philadelphia Flyers have hit a low point in their season -- something head coach Peter Laviolette refuses to dwell on.

“I’m not ready to paint such a negative picture as everybody else is,” Laviolette told CSN Philadelphia. “Through the course of a long season, there are going to be ups and downs. That happens and we’ve talked about it.

“There’s things that we can do better. We acknowledge that. We look at it. We work at it. We look to get better. This team’s had a lot of success month-to-month so far and we had a little bit of a road block this weekend to winning games and we’ll get back on track.”

The “weekend road block” is in reference to a pair of losses to NHL elites -- Saturday’s 5-2 loss to the Eastern Conference-leading Rangers and Sunday’s 4-3 defeat to the Western Conference-leading Red Wings. Beating upper-echelon teams has been a major struggle for the Flyers this season; they’re 0-5 against the Blueshirts and just 15-12-3 against all clubs currently in the playoff picture (seeds 1-8) in the NHL.

As such, the Flyers are now a whopping 10 points back of New York for top spot in the Atlantic. That’s a far cry from Dec. 19, when the Flyers had a four-point lead on the Rangers for first in the division.

Not that Laviolette ever thinks about it.

“I don’t ever talk about the Rangers, 10 points – that never comes up,” he said. “We talk about winning the next hockey game. We talk about winning all of our hockey games and doing the best we can on a nightly basis.

“We’ve got short-term goals and we’ve got segment goals and we’ve got long-term goals. The objective is to win as many games as you can. Nothing changes for us. There’s nothing we can do about the weekend that just happened. We’re disappointed.”