The Philadelphia Flyers had a chance to move above the .500 mark, had a chance to climb within the top eight teams in the Eastern Conference. It didn’t happen Monday, however as the Flyers dropped a 4-2 loss to the visiting Toronto Maple Leafs.
It marked the Flyers’ second loss in the month of February to Toronto. The Flyers are three games away from the midway point of this lockout shortened season, and the journey toward a post-season position is becoming more and more dire every day.
“We’re not going to make the playoffs if we keep playing like this,” Flyers Scott Hartnell told CSN Philly. “We talked about it after the game.
“If we don’t learn fast, as in Wednesday night [against Washington], it’s going to be a long season.
“Guys have to realize, every point counts...Game 20 or Game 30. We have to wake it up.”
Their opponents from Toronto, meanwhile, continue to occupy a playoff spot. The Leafs sit seventh in the Eastern Conference, and have won seven of their last 10 games, opening up a five-point cushion on the eighth-place Tampa Bay Lightning.
The motivation for Toronto’s effort in Philadelphia was a dramatic and disappointing 3-2 loss to their Ontario rivals, the Ottawa Senators, on Saturday.
“For us it was about flushing what happened, the scar from the other night,” Leafs coach Randy Carlyle told NHL.com. “We wanted to make sure we could flush that with our effort. You have to give our guys credit, they battled. They came in and went toe to toe with a pretty good hockey team over there.”