The Penguins weren’t that much better than the Flyers this season. They beat their cross-state rivals all four times they played and scored five goals in each, but they needed overtime in two of those games and still only finished two points ahead of their younger, less experienced Metropolitan Division counterparts. Even if you believe the Penguins took it easy on themselves for the first few months of the season, there was parity in this series.
The Penguins reminded the Flyers (and everyone else) that they’re still the champs
Sidney Crosby’s line dominated, the Flyers’ goalies faltered, and the Penguins asserted themselves in Game 1.
Photo by Justin Berl/Getty Images
Until the playoffs started.
The Penguins’ 7-0 win in Game 1 of their Eastern Conference quarterfinal on Wednesday wasn’t as much of a bludgeoning as the score suggested, but it was still a substantial beating. The Flyers controlled 53 percent of the game’s total shot attempts, but the Penguins got far more high-quality chances, and their world-class finishers looked like world-class finishers against a pair of iffy goaltenders. The Flyers got run out of the building against the two-time defending champions.
Sidney Crosby’s line made the game a blowout all by itself.
In Crosby and Evgeni Malkin, the Penguins have two of the three or four best centers in the world. In Derick Brassard, they have a third-line center who’s really a second-liner. And in Riley Sheahan-they have a fourth-line center who’s more like a third-liner. Depth down the middle has been their hallmark since Malkin joined Crosby in 2006, and it continues to force opposing coaches into choices that will necessarily be wrong in some way.
On Wednesday, Flyers coach Dave Hakstol wasn’t usually the one making the choices. As the home team, the Penguins had the last line change at every whistle, and they got to decide who matched up against whom. The most notable choice Pens coach Mike Sullivan made was to stick Crosby’s line, with wingers Jake Guentzel and Bryan Rust, against the Flyers’ top defensive pairing, Ivan Provorov and Shayne Gostisbehere, as much as possible.
That pairing did fine from a possession standpoint, but Crosby’s line still managed to control almost 60 percent of the shot attempts at even strength in total, while that line was on the ice. All three players scored, and Crosby did three times, including this beauty:
The Crosby line did enough damage to win the game on its own. Four goals at even strength in one game by one line (plus another power play marker by Guentzel) is a pretty certain recipe for success. The Flyers did a bit better against Malkin’s line, with Carl Hagelin and Patric Hornqvist, holding it to around 50 percent possession, but even that line scored two even-strength goals. The Flyers’ bottom two lines, centered by Valtteri Filppula and Jori Lehtera, outplayed the Penguins’ bottom lines, centered by Brassard and Sheahan. But that didn’t matter at all, because Crosby’s and Malkin’s lines were filling the net.
Goaltending made a big difference, too. Only the Penguins got it.
You’d be reading a vastly different story if Matt Murray hadn’t made so many saves for Pittsburgh and the Flyers’ tandem of Brian Elliott and and Petr Mrazek hadn’t been so awful.
On the one hand, the goalies were just a reflection of their teams. The Penguins’ shots were drastically more dangerous than the Flyers’, as this shooting heat map illustrates:
The Penguins had 10 high-danger scoring chances to the Flyers’ six, according to the analytics site Natural Stat Trick, which also produced that graphic.
Still, the Flyers’ net-minders let up seven goals on 33 shots on net. That’s bad. Murray made a couple of exquisite stops and pitched a 24-save shutout. That’s good. The Penguins were going to win this game anyway, but the difference between 7-0 and 4-2 was that only one team had a goaltender actually stop the pucks fired in his direction.
The series is still young, but the Flyers have no clear solutions.
Philadelphia’s goalies should do better, because no team is likely to get a .788 save percentage for an entire playoff series. Crosby’s line probably won’t score four or five goals every game, because: a) that’s a ton of goals, and b) the Flyers will get the last change when the series shifts eastward for Games 3 and 4. But neither Elliott nor Mrazek inspires that much confidence, and even if the Flyers get in Crosby’s way, that will probably leave more favorable matchups for either Malkin’s or Brassard’s line.
The Penguins have this series’ deepest forward group, its best goaltender, and every structural advantage they could need. The Flyers aren’t cooked because of one game, but nothing that happened Wednesday suggests they have a chance.
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