The Flyers' 5-4 loss to Anaheim on Saturday had one genuinely rotten officiating moment, and separately, a hockey team blew two leads at home. Flyers fans are gluing those together into a single robbery. They don't fit.
Start with the part that's real. Late in the game the officials waved off an icing, and Jamie Drysdale paid for it, getting nailed and flying awkwardly into the boards to Joseph Woll's left. That's exactly the collision hybrid icing was invented to prevent. The NHL moved off touch icing in 2013-14 for one reason: to stop players racing to a puck along the end boards and getting hurt. A blown icing race is the one kind of mistake this rule was built to take out of a referee's hands. They missed it anyway. On a safety call, that's indefensible, and if Drysdale is hurt, the stripes wear that collision.
Now the part the crowd would rather not sit with. That same sequence handed Philadelphia a 6-on-4 with about 40 seconds left when Sennecke went off for hooking, giving them two extra skaters, a pulled goalie, and a full power play to tie a home game. The Flyers didn't score. You can't call the refs the reason you lost and then skip past the moment they handed you the advantage to save it.
RatingThe man with the best seat in the building didn't make their argument. Rick Tocchet called it "a game we should've won," said his team let the Ducks "off the hook," and said the Flyers got "loose" defensively. That's a coach describing a self-inflicted wound, and if anyone in that room had an incentive to point at the officials, it was him. He pointed at his own bench instead.
Look at how this actually went. Philadelphia led 2-0 in the first and 3-2 in the second and coughed up both. Anaheim scored three times in the second period. Matvei Michkov was terrific. He scored twice to keep the Flyers alive, and his second goal cut it to 5-4 with 11:43 still on the clock. Eleven-plus minutes. If this were purely a late-game heist, the Flyers wouldn't have had most of a period to find one more goal and come up empty.
There was bad luck too. A.J. Greer's tying goal was ruled in off the far post with Woll's skate across the line, the kind of fluke that goes against you some nights. But a bounce and a missed icing are just the margins on a game the Flyers had already let slip by getting outplayed for two periods.
The distinction matters for what happens next. If the refs beat you, you shrug and move on. If you blow a two-goal lead twice against a team that had lost five straight in regulation and sat below .500, you've got a problem that Columbus on Tuesday will happily expose. The Flyers had just won three in a row after an 0-6-3 start. This was the night to show it meant something, and they let a beatable Anaheim team walk out of Philadelphia with the win.
Be furious about the no-call. It deserves fury. Just don't use it to cover for a third period that was the Flyers' own doing.
