This isn’t Berghain; they’re not going to turn you away at the door; the more the merrier. Everybody who’s anybody is in the penalty box in South Philly, from the generation’s greatest skater to the lowliest goon. And by the time the lights were turned on and everyone scurried home, 10 guilty men watched simultaneously from the sin bin as the Flyers reversed the game’s momentum and and 86ed the Penguins to take a 3-0 series lead.
We should have known the box was The Spot from the start, when Sidney Crosby was sentenced for the first embellishment penalty of his long career. He took a legitimate high stick from Garnet Hathaway before a faceoff, but went down like he’d been shot. “Sid doesn’t embellish,” insisted Penguins head coach Dan Muse, but Sid might admit otherwise, after he watched the replay on the jumbotron and he offered a sheepish little welp face.
The game started and stayed chippy, and the Philadelphia crowd sounded especially bloodthirsty. They’ve waited a long time for this. The last time the Flyers won a playoff game at home, Barack Obama was president. Just one player on the entire roster was even here for that. “That was the craziest building I’ve ever played in,” said veteran defenseman Nick Seeler, whose first career playoff goal would prove to be a big one. The Flyers are a young team, still figuring out what they have and who they are, but showing all the signs of one of those “too naive to know they shouldn’t make a deep run” teams that make a deep run. There’s no particular reason these kids should play a game similar to the Broad Street Bullies of yore, or really every edition ever of the Flyers. But some bone-deep genetic memory, something about that logo or perhaps that city inevitably turns a man’s thoughts to pugilism.
Down 1-0 early in the second and seeking a spark, Travis Konecny got into it with Bryan Rust. “Turned into a bit of a WWE match,” is how Rust described the ensuing scuffle that involved more or less everyone on the ice.
The officials, trying to cool things down, simply sent everybody on both teams to the penalty boxes. They got kind of cramped, and not everyone knew what they were doing time for. “I didn’t do anything,” said Erik Karlsson, who officially was charged with a roughing minor. “They just decided to take everybody who was on the ice, which I’ve never seen in my 17 years. It’s unfortunate. It benefited them more than it benefited us.”
Almost by definition, any momentum swing from a big brawl is going to favor the team trailing, because what’s the worst that could happen? They continue to trail? But the Flyers got an extra bonus from the officials, who on top of the 10 offsetting penalties slapped Rust with a roughing call that gave Philadelphia a power play. Less than a minute into it, Trevor Zegras capitalized to tie the game and immediately skated over to celebrate with his colleagues serving hard time. “There was a lot of them in there and I figured they were going to be jumping around,” Zegras said. “So I thought, if I scored, I was going right to them, for sure.”
Zegras’s was the first of three Flyers goals on four shots, with Rasmus Ristolainen and Seeler beating Stuart Skinner, that gave the Flyers the lead for good, and had the crowd derisively chanting Skinner’s name. That December Skinner-for-Jarry trade always did feel a little like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Well, I guess in this instance it was more like the Titanic was trading its deck chairs to another boat? And that boat was the Lusitania. I’ll work on the metaphor.
By the time the smoke cleared, the Flyers had triumphed 5-2 and now have three chances to close out the series, the first coming Saturday night in Philly. The Penguins will be desperate, and the Flyers will be the Flyers, so the penalty box once again promises to be the place to see and be seen. You might want to spring for table service.