With the Flyers in town for the first time since the Blackhawks vanquished them in the 2010 Stanley Cup finals, it was a good time to compare where the teams are this season.
The Hawks not only didn’t resemble the squad that hoisted the Cup in June, they didn’t look much like the one that put together a complete effort just 24 hours earlier in Detroit.
The defending champions came out flat Sunday and stayed that way, and the Flyers took advantage to record a 4-1 victory in front of 21,660 at the United Center. Jeff Carter had two goals and an assist, Nikolay Zherdev a goal and an assist and Claude Giroux four assists to provide the offense. Sergei Bobrovsky came up big in goal for Philadelphia, which has the look of a team worthy of challenging for another deep postseason run.
The Hawks fell in regulation for just the second time in their last nine games and lost the second of back-to-back games after steamrolling the Red Wings 4-1 on Saturday.
“If we want to compare our team to the team we were (Saturday), we obviously didn’t bring the speed and the tempo of our game like we did (against the Wings),” Hawks captain Jonathan Toews said. “In more ways than one we were just too easy to defend. We weren’t on the same page with each other. That made it hard to be predictable, especially in the offensive zone when it’s time to capitalize on some of our chances.
“When you come out flat against a team like that, it’s not easy to come back.”
The Hawks were forced to come back after Carter sandwiched goals around a Zherdev score to put the Flyers in command early in the third period. Marian Hossa got one back for the Hawks on a penalty shot, but that was all they could generate against Bobrovsky and a defense that went on lockdown after Philadelphia grabbed the lead.
“They were trapping when we had the puck in our zone,” Hossa said. “They had almost five guys in the neutral zone and were just waiting for our mistakes. Sometimes we tried to beat them by one guy and it didn’t work. They just waited for the chances and it was really tough to get through that middle zone.”
Scott Hartnell closed out the scoring with an empty-net goal, and when the dust settled, Corey Crawford had suffered the loss to drop to 16-9-2 on the season.
“Bottom line, I just think they started to outwork us a little bit,” Hawks defenseman Niklas Hjalmarsson said. “They played really well at the same time. We didn’t maybe play like we did (Saturday) when we played a real good team game throughout 60 minutes. We didn’t play that throughout the whole game (Sunday).
“Philly is a really good team. If you have a couple of bad moments out there, they’re going to score on you.”
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