The Philadelphia Flyers are playing the rest of the season fully aware that there is no playoff hockey at the end of it. If rivals Pittsburgh Penguins can’t get healthy or reduce penalties then they may well be doing the same.
Brayden Schenn scored twice, in the 4-2 win for Philadelphia as Vincent Lecavalier added his first goal in nearly three months, ending a 27 game goal drought. Carlo Colaiacovo found a rare goal and Steve Mason stopped 24 shots for Philadelphia, who now obtain a seven game winning streak in Pittsburgh.
On the Pens side of things Sidney Crosby hit a historic landmark by scoring his 300th career goal for the Penguins, boosting his NHL-leading point total to 80. But there was little support for the face of Pittsburgh as the Penguins could not find a way to muster up any kind of offensive charge. The absence of Malkin and Letang probably had something to do with it, the team have only come up with 19 goals in 12 games since the injury of Malkin. The poor run remained along an unproductive night of Hockey for the Penguins.
Philadelphia continued to build momentum later in the game as Pittsburgh struggled to spend any time at all in the offensive zone. The Penguins took five penalties which surely didn’t help matters and applied huge additional stress on an already thinly spread D which all five members played 20 minutes.
The pace of the Flyers was simply too much to handle. The Pens did everything they could to keep up but when Schenn fired home his 16th of the season, there was a resounding feeling of giving up from the Pens. The nail was in the coffin and the two points were in the bag. They will look to carry this momentum into the game against the Hurricanes on April 4th.
