from Sam Donnellon of the Philadelphia Daily News,
"The next 20 games mean a lot,'' said R.J. Umberger, whose third-period goal tied a game that appeared to once again be slipping from the Flyers' shaky grasp. "We're not going to quit. We're going to take advantage of this stretch of home games and be a better road team down the stretch here. A lot can happen in the second half of the year.''
And a lot must. To have even half a chance to make the playoffs, the Flyers would need points in 30 of their remaining 41 games and would need to win 24 of them, according to SportsClubStats.com. Stated more starkly, a 23-14-4 record the rest of the way would give the Flyers just a 0.4 chance of making the postseason.
Can you say, "Snowball in H-E-Double-hockey-sticks?"
Berube preaches a one-game-at-a-time approach, but the locker-room vocabulary now regularly includes phrases like "streak," "run" and even "games." Beating Boston would shrink the margin between the teams to seven, losing would increase it to double digits, but this half-done, half-empty season is way more complicated than that. There are too many games and too many teams to play one-on-one, and so the focus remains an internal one....
Fire the coach, right? Instead, Hextall, amid threats that changes will be made if the team does not perform better, continually gives Berube a vote of confidence.
This does not mean he sees Berube as his coach in the future. Contrary to a popular outcry, the Flyers don't always try to solve their issues from within, as Ken Hitchcock and Peter Laviolette demonstrate. But they almost always try to fix them that way.
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