Five games into the season, the Flyers are still looking for their first win. Wednesday's 2-1 loss in Ottawa was the latest: Yakemchuk's power-play goal held up as the winner, Philadelphia fell to 0-3-2, and the Senators improved to 3-1-0. The uncomfortable part for Rick Tocchet is what the loss actually showed. His team played better than it has all season and still lost. The problem was never talent.
Matvei Michkov scored Philadelphia's lone goal, and if you watched him do it, you already know why people in this city are building their hope around him instead of around the coach. That's true and it matters. A team that couldn't generate anything through four flat games suddenly generating real chances in the fifth is not nothing.
Four consecutive penalties in the first period handed Ottawa the platform to win a tight game before Philadelphia ever got its legs under it. That's a team that hasn't been coached out of its worst habits five games into a new season, the kind of thing a head coach is supposed to fix back in training camp.
Then there's the shape of the game itself. The urgency everyone's calling progress showed up late, well after Philadelphia was already behind and the game mostly decided. A team that only plays with desperation once it's losing shows that the desperation was there the whole time, and the coaching staff isn't getting it out of them until panic forces the issue. That's been the pattern through this winless stretch, and one more near-miss against an opponent that's off to a good start of its own doesn't erase it.
A team that competes hard for sixty minutes and loses anyway is, in some sense, closer than one that gets run out of the building. But "closer" has produced the same number in the loss column five times running, and Tocchet himself, asked about a concerning start, said the team needs to "go through the ABCs." That's a coach stalling for time while his best young players carry a game plan that keeps putting them in penalty trouble and keeps waiting until it's too late to push.
Michkov and Jiricek are the reason to keep watching this team. Tocchet is the reason they're 0-3-2, with his fingerprints all over an undisciplined first period that left them chasing a game they lost by one goal. The players are ahead of the coach right now, and until that changes, nothing about this losing streak is progress.
