Dan Vladar let in seven goals on opening night and he's going to hear about it all week. He shouldn't. He wasn't good, but the only thing worse than his night was the game his teammates gave him in front of it.
Look at what happened in front of Vladar before you blame him for what ended up behind him. The Penguins finished with 38 shots to Philadelphia's 19. At 5-on-5, Pittsburgh out-attempted the Flyers 52-32 and out-shot them 31-11, and ran up a share of expected goals that left Philadelphia almost nothing to claim. The Penguins generated 21 high-danger scoring chances. The Flyers managed five. The Flyers' defense stopped defending and their forwards stopped backchecking, over and over, for sixty minutes. Vladar never got beat clean, he got abandoned.
The special teams numbers make it worse. Pittsburgh went 2-for-4 on the power play and scored a shorthanded goal on top of it. Philadelphia went 0-for-3. A team can survive a rough night from its goalie. It can't survive its own penalty kill collapsing and its power play going silent in the same game and still point the finger at the guy in the mask.
Rick Tocchet's call deserves scrutiny too. Vladar had barely played in the preseason while working through an injury, and Philadelphia was walking into the first half of a back-to-back. Tocchet left him in anyway, start to finish, never going to Joseph Woll even as the Penguins scored five goals on their first eighteen shots. If the group in front of Vladar was always going to play this badly, leaving him out there to absorb all seven goals instead of pulling him after two was still Tocchet's decision to make, and it wasn't a good one.
It's one game. Eighty-three more are coming, and no single September result should decide how anyone feels about a season. The question is who's responsible for this one, and the tape isn't close. The team got outworked that badly, gave up a shorthanded goal on top of an 0-for-3 power play, and got booed off its own ice on opening night, with the fans louder than the goal horn. That's where the responsibility sits.
The scoreline tied the worst opening-night loss in franchise history, a 7-0 defeat from more than five decades ago. Dan Vladar wasn't on that 1971 team either. Whatever's broken in Philadelphia right now sits in front of the goalie.
