Cam York did the thing again. In overtime in Calgary on Sunday, Owen Tippett put a long shot on net, York and Christian Dvorak both chased Devin Cooley, Dvorak bowled York over, and the Flames were gone the other way on a 3-on-1 that Matt Coronato finished off a Matvei Gridin feed. The Flyers lost 4-3, dropped to 4-10-5, and handed Calgary a point they had no business giving up. Fans piled on York, and the play has his fingerprints on it. But the person who decides York is out there for sudden death is Rick Tocchet, and he keeps making the same call.
Rewind to October 28 against Columbus. The Flyers blow a three-goal lead, go to overtime, and it's York driving the puck to the net himself with nobody left behind him. Fantilli grabs the loose puck, Kent Johnson skates in untouched, and beats Dan Vladar to win it. Same player, same zone, vanishing at the exact moment a mistake is fatal. That's a tendency, the kind coaches are paid to spot and fix.
Tocchet spotted it. After the Columbus loss he stood at the podium and said the overtime decision making this year has been "mind boggling on some players," and that "we gotta fix it quickly." He named the problem and promised a fix. Then he sent the same group back out in Calgary, with the same result, and when he was asked about a specific player this time, he said, "I'm not going to discuss every player. I mean it is what it is."
RatingTwo weeks ago the coach was angry enough to call out his skaters in public. Now, after the pattern repeats, he's shrugging. "It is what it is" is what you say when you've run out of answers. There's no public sign of any change to the 3-on-3 personnel. The same breakdown happened again, and the bench's response was to stop talking about it.
York isn't alone out there. The puck management, the turnovers, the whole fragile feel of this team belongs to more than one defenseman. The Flyers have lost nine of their ten one-goal games this season and entered Sunday winless in anything decided after regulation, a streak that only grew in Calgary. York, Tippett, Zegras, Dvorak and Benoit are veterans, and they keep producing the same kind of mistake. But every one of them is on the ice because Tocchet put them there, and the specific recurring failure, York getting caught up ice in overtime, is the one the coach personally flagged and vowed to fix. He had the information and the microphone, and nothing in the reporting since suggests he's changed the lineup because of it.
None of this falls on the goaltender. Vladar stopped 22 shots and deserved better than to watch his teammates get run over on a 3-on-1 in front of him. Barkey, Acciari and Tippett scored. The Flyers did enough, three times, to win a hockey game. What they couldn't do was survive four minutes of overtime with the same player caught in the same spot again.
Nineteen games into the season, this roster sits at the bottom of the Eastern Conference with one win in its last seven. There's a lot to fix and not much time before it calcifies into the whole year. The overtime problem is the easiest one on the list, because the coach already diagnosed it himself. Until Tocchet changes who he trusts for 3-on-3, the losses will keep looking exactly like Sunday's, and the blame stops being York's the second the coach refuses to move him.
