"A" for Effort Still Doesn't Translate to a "W"

I'll start off with a touch of sour grapes: the longer a team like Buffalo goes on a season-opening streak, the more likely they are to toss in a clunker due to fatigue or carelessness.

That said, the Flyers turned in their second best performance of the season last night, and clearly their best at home. They seized momentum early. They rallied from a two-goal deficit to tie, then lead. Three Phantoms call-ups (Nedved notwithstanding) provided much-needed spark in both ends of the rink. They had three fights, each of which elevated the level of emotion and finally created a sense that the players have each others' backs. There was even a touch of the old "we wuz robbed by da crooked refs" floating around afterwards, since Buffalo's tying score happened as a result of a "questionable" bench minor.

But it still wasn't enough, even though coach Stevens expressed elation, and Tim Panaccio wrote his column in today's Inquirer as if the moral victory of an overtime loss point was both akin to a true win, and also an indicator that Old Time Hockey may be the key to shaking the Flyers out of their deep funk.

I never thought I'd see the day that a one-goal, come-from-ahead loss would be heralded as such a positive, but there we have it, folks. I guess all of us fans and critics, who've never played a shift in the NHL, and never saw a minute in "the room" have it all wrong, daring to spread our doom and gloom, calling for a full-on rebuild. Nobody can ignore the intensity of the positivity springing from this overtime loss, as if it were a cover for just how badly things are going internally. It would do a world of good, I think, for the players and the coaches to downplay games like this as the first step in a thousand needed in the right direction, not act as if the peak of the turnaround is in sight.

The Flyers still lost. They are still at the bottom of the league with a 3-11-2 record. Key young players are still not translating good, hard work into points. The defense is porous, the coaching too distressingly close to a minor league mindset, and the injuries the wrong kind to the wrong people. Even if the work ethic becomes smarter as well as harder and produces more results, there is still a long way to go between "competitive" and "winning."

Give me a solid five-game winning (NOT point) streak, and maybe I'll begin to change my opinion.