On Frozen Blog

It was on my Metro ride in to Verizon Center yesterday that I received the season’s first irrefutable signs, in person, of a lasting reorienting of the hockey world, the tell-tale indicators of a durable last-place standing and accompanying misery settling in on Pennsylvania partisans. A handful — and not dozens — of Flyers’ faithful were aboard, in their customary Hextall and Lindros sweaters. This was a Saturday night! Like cockroaches they’d made a practice of littering our trains into town in uninvited fashion for the past 10 years. Where were they now? Instead, these token emblems of weird fashion sat there muted, with steeled visages, betraying a discernible foreboding, as if acutely aware of their foul-smelling fate ahead.
It was lovely.
Inside Verizon Center, there was marginally improved orange and black representation. But nothing approaching the entire section-dominating ratios of seasons past. The Flyers jumped out to an unsettling 1-0 lead, and I confess, for the briefest of moments I considered the possibility that the Flyers having had Thursday and Friday nights off, while our guys were in Atlanta in a toughie Friday night, might make for an unnecessarily competitive game.
But not to worry. The tilting of the ice the Caps’ way, for the rest of the way, immediately followed the center-ice draw after Mike Knuble’s tally. I kept waiting for an outbreak of “Let’s Go Flyers” — virtually an every-5-minutes anthem at Caps’ home games against Philly. But it never came. And here’s why: even ahead most of the first period, the Flyers were never in the game. They knew it, their fans knew it, and even their coaches seemed to know it.

For those attending the game last night there was a palpable buzz about television broadcasters Joe B and Craig calling the game from ice level, between the players’ benches. The evening was novel for me in that I was seated just about as low, right behind Flyers’ coaches and ex-Caps Craig Berube and Terry Murray. It was from this vantage that I witnessed, with jaw-dropping disbelief, the discrepancy not only in talent but especially speed between these two teams.
“You could feel the breeze of Alexander Semin wheeling by on the wing,” Craig Laughlin told the Comcast viewing audience later in the evening.
The only breezes the Flyers ocassion are associated with the rapid northward movements up and away from them in the standings by their Eastern conference foes.
As the Caps’ second-period onslaught ensued I was privvy to something I’d never before seen in pro hockey: seeming surrender by a coaching staff. The Caps had blown past the Flyers to a 3-1 lead, and on the bench, coaches Berube, Murray, and even head guy John Stevens watched the deluge silently, for minute after minute, their arms crossed, offering only intermittent glances at one another. Not a single whisper of encouragement or instruction from one of them to a single player. Even in big-time blowouts I’d become accustomed to seeing coaching staffs coach, until the bitter end.
And yet last night I wasn’t left with the sense that the Flyers’ bench crew had abdicated its responsibility but rather that their keen eyes merely had acknowledged what was irrefutable to anyone watching: there was no manner of strategy, no in-game adjustments to be made to aid their cause. And it might have been precisely because they’d had days of rest and preparation and yet were so competitively marginalized last night that the Flyers’ coaches were muted and inactive as the game’s certain outcome set in.
I guess if Coach Stevens were pressed to utter anything into Derian Hatcher’s ear seconds before a shift against Alexander Semin, it would have been “Good luck.”