Flyers Crush Floundering Penguins, 6-1

During losses this past weekend to the Capitals and Rangers, the Penguins played well enough, at least in spurts, to deserve a better fate.

As for last night’s 6-1 loss to the Flyers at Wells Fargo Center?

They deserved the fate they got. Richly.

Not only were they soundly outplayed by their Metro rival, as evidenced by a whopping 38-24 disadvantage in shots on goal, but they downright collapsed near the end of the second period while yielding a pair of goals in a 10-second span.

Standup guy that he is, goalie Alex Nedeljkovic placed the blame for the ghastly defeat squarely upon his own shoulders.

Uh uh, Ned. Maybe you didn’t give your finest Georges Vezina imitation, but that’s not how I saw it. Rather, it was a case of one chain reaction of defensive ineptitude in front of you after another.

Indeed, time and again the Pens resembled a collection of ill-placed dominos falling. Total chaos. A brick wall couldn’t have prevented pucks from going in behind that poor excuse for team defense.

During his recent and much-publicized rant, P.K. Subban said the team was poorly constructed. BINGO. The sum of the individual parts definitely don’t add up to a team. At least not a very good one.

This is especially true on defense, which features two aging stars who were never accused of playing sound defense in the first place and a rag-tag collection of sixth and seventh d-men.

A recipe for the type of disaster we’re seeing play out on a nightly basis.

I’ll close this brief recap with another baseball analogy. As presently constructed, the Pens remind me very much of the fictional New York Knights from the movie, The Natural, before Roy Hobbs arrived to save the team from itself.

Puckpourri

Our lone goal, which came at 6:09 of the second period, was a beauty. Kris Letang fed Michael Bunting in the neutral zone, who in turn flipped the puck to open space in the Flyers’ zone. Philip Tomasino outraced a Philly defender to the puck and beat Sam Ersson with a slick forehand-to-backhand move at top speed.

Connor McDavid-ish stuff.

This kid’s a keeper.

On the flip side, is anyone else tired of seeing Cody Glass cast in a top-six role? The kid works hard and hustles and I’m all for giving him a chance. But whatever scoring pedigree he possessed in junior isn’t translating to the bigs.

Coach Mike Sullivan juggled his top two defensive pairings…with catastrophic results. Pierre-Olivier Joseph finished a minus-4 and new partner Erik Karlsson a minus-3. Karlsson’s season-high, seven-game points streak came to a skidding halt.

Perhaps we’ll get a look at recently claimed defenseman Vladislav Kolyachonok one of these days. He can’t possibly do any worse than our current crop of d-men, can he?

Vincent Desharnais returned to the lineup in place of Ryan Graves. His errant outlet pass led to Philly’s sixth and final goal. Bryan Rust suited up as well. In a corresponding move, Boko Imama was placed on IR with an upper-body injury. So much for physical forechecking.

Coming off the high of winning the 4 Nations Face-Off, I can’t imagine how deflating this must be for Sidney Crosby. I feel for the rest of the guys, too. Nobody wants to lose.

How bad have things gotten? The last time the Pens gave up 19 goals over a three-game stretch was 2003-04, when we lost an NHL-record 18 games in a row (0-17-1). That’s how bad.

Oh well. You don’t get rewarded for finishing 19^th overall and missing the playoffs by three points, like we did last season. If you’re going to be bad, might as well be really bad. The better to glean a top pick in the draft.

With the sixth-fewest points in the league, we’re right on course.