Flyers give up effort…I mean, the lead, and lose to the Thrashers. Again…

Remember earlier in today’s preview when I said the Flyers have been playing better hockey as of late? Yeah, I lied. Ilya Kovalchuk, Evander Kane, and Jim Slater made the Flyers look like complete goofs tonight. There were two or three stretches of one or two minutes where the Flyers actually looked like they wanted to play hockey, but aside from that, the team was invisible. Again. To add more sting to tonight’s loss, the Atlanta Thrashers just moved ahead of the Flyers in the Eastern Conference standings. They now have 56 points. Yes, the Thrashers are ahead of the Flyers.

The Flyers had a pretty good hand on this game heading into the third period. They played a solid second period from the 10-minute mark on through the end of it. Dan Carcillo scored on his 25th birthday to make the game 3-1 heading into the third period.

Up to this point, the Flyers kept Ilya Kovalchuk under wraps. Kovalchuk would make it a 1 goal game after a flopped face off sent the puck bouncing right over Matt Carle’s stick and onto his. It was all downhill from there.

The Flyers completely forgot how to play offense after Kovy’s goal and, for the rest of the game, it was all Atlanta.

The Good:

• Claude Giroux had a fantastic game tonight. First, he pulls a sick move and deposit the puck in the back of the net, and then he sets up Arron Asham with a pretty pass that he buried.
• Power play puck movement was better than it has been. Flyers still didn’t score on the power play, but they didn’t have as many opportunities. Atlanta was just up to the task of killing, too.
• Everything but the part of the game where the Flyers didn’t slack………wait…what?

The Bad:

• Ray Emery didn’t look so sharp tonight. He wasn’t single handily at fault for any of the goals, but the ones that did go into the net were very uncharacteristic of him.
• Everything I didn’t mention.

This team is worrying me.

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