Game #38 Review: Flyers 5 @ Ducks 4 (SO) 1/2/09

5 (SO)

@

4

This was a really fun game. Not a lot of defense, a lot of hitting, two fights in the first period, a six-goal second period, a shootout. What more could you ask for? And a shootout win is just as good as a regulation win when facing an out-of-conference foe.

• I know New Jersey and Washington to be often overrun by Flyers fans, but I totally didn't expect to hear "Let's Go Fly-ers" chants drowning out the crowd in Anaheim of all places. Anaheim is about as far from Philadelphia as you can get in the NHL. There've been big Flyers contingents in the stands all road trip long. Flyers fans who don't get to see the club in person much are turning out for these games, making the first four of the six on the road trip all sell outs. And setting all-time attendance records in Chicago and Anaheim. Pretty cool.
• Scottie Upshall doesn't seem to have missed a beat.
• That was not a great effort by Martin Biron for most of the game, but he played as well as he needed to, getting the two points and the win. It was a real good shootout effort from him, which has definitely been his Achilles' heel.
• The color issues CSN Philly were having were actually kinda fun. The orange on the Flyers jerseys was often hot pink, sometimes blue, sometimes purple. It added even more surreality to the second period.
• Claude Giroux is just up from the AHL and is getting to lead off shoot-outs? Like the confidence in him, but maybe lets key things down just a bit. Mike Richards played his shootout round perfectly, so it was all good.
• The Flyers two got goals from their defensemen tonight, with Ossi Vaananen and Braydon Coburn. Those two goals are two more goals than the Flyers got from their defensemen during the seventeen games of the 2008 Playoffs...
• Speaking of unlikely goal-getters, kudos to Josh Gratton on his first of the season.
• J-S Giguere's style of goaltending looks like a third grader thought of it. The old strategy of putting the fattest kid possible in net so he takes up as much space as possible. Who goes down on EVERY shot? As a disciple of the Parent-Hextall school of goaltending, I can't think of any worse strategy. God only knows how he got all those shutouts in those 2003 playoffs.

Onto Los Angeles for the Flyers, to play the struggling Kings. Will they get a sweep in California? Will it be another sell out? Will anyone have heard of the Kings' starting goalie? Only time will tell.