Please Enjoy These Quotes from the Penguins on Their ‘Mental Collapse' in Last Year's Playoffs

Share

The Flyers' 2012 quarterfinal playoff series with the Penguins featured fights, goals,  suspension-inducing hits, poor goaltending and worse defense. Let's also not forget Peter Laviolette breaking a stick over the boards during a philosophical debate with Pittsburgh coach Dan Bylsma on the final day of the regular season.
For Flyers fans, it was about as good as it gets (minus a Stanley Cup).
And for the Penguins ... well, they're still trying to figure out what the hell happened.
For reference, Pittsburgh killed off 237 of its 270 penalties during the 2011-12 regular season, good enough for the third-best percentage in the league (87.8). Come playoff time, the Pens surrendered 12 of their 31 goals allowed while the Flyers were on the power play, meaning they successfully killed off less than half of the Flyers' man-advantages (11 of 23, 47.8 percent).
Thanks to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, we'll let Brooks Orpik, Marc-Andre Fleury and Sidney Crosby take it from here:

Orpik: "It was just a big lack of confidence. I think it was more a mental collapse than anything."

"...they were all tentative mistakes, really. Guys who were maybe afraid to make a mistake."

"Our attitude was a little fragile."

Fleury: "The Flyers are the Flyers. I hate losing to them."

"That [series] was crazy bad. Everything just went all wrong, all the time."

Crosby:  "I don't think it's one that's easy to analyze -- I think we've all tried to do it -- but even if you ask people outside the series, they'll never be able to explain fully what happened."

Hmm. I don't know. I feel like this does a decent job:

Contact Us