Flyers Game Day News and Notes: The Skating Wounded and the Relentless Pursuit of Tired Criticisms

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No matter which reports you believe, it's good to hear that injured forwards Jeff Carter and Ian Laperriere are increasingly healthy. Most seem to agree that Lappy could return soon, including Paul Holmgren, who yesterday put his timetable ahead of that of Carter. CSN sources today have game 4 as a possible return date. My take is you may as well be reading tea leaves if you want to know the status of an injured player in the NHL playoffs. 

Lappy has been cleared for contact and has skated, albeit while wearing a helmet with added padding and a face shield. (No it isn't the one at the left, but it's hard to believe we've had two different major facial injuries with which to use that gag pic of Lappy this season.) An interesting question emerges if and when Carter and Laperriere are ready to play again—who gets scratched? Andreas Nodl has stepped up nicely on the fourth line, but I think it's fairly obvious he gets to watch from the press box when Lappy is cleared to play. Nothing at all against Nodl either, just the way it goes. 

Carter's a much different story, and there's also the matter of the vandalized Montreal reporter's car. 

The forward lines are clicking well right now, and Ville Leino has contributed nicely in his time with a few different line sets. He'd be damn hard for Peter Laviolette to bench right about now. Not all that coincidentally, Scott Hartnell—whose benching was called for by many fans who wanted to see more of Leino down the stretch of the regular season—has really become a force in the last handful of games. Lavvy has never shown much inclination to bench Hartnell for a full game, although Hartnell did spend a period on the pine in these playoffs just before his resurgence started. 

Not only is there the question of which forward to scratch for Carter, but also how to set the lines if and when he returns. We're talking about a good problem to have here. Carter and Lappy are impact players, and when they went down along with Gagne, many of us believed Lappy was the biggest loss of the bunch because his role is so irreplaceable on this team. 

I'm basically going to punt on "who to scratch" question for Carter for now because I don't think the decision will need to be made imminently, and a whole lot can happen before it does. The Flyers winning. They've won five games in a row, with the fifth being the most convincing of the lot. There's no need to rush a player back, as opposed to when Simon Gagne got healthy in a hurry with the Flyers facing certain elimination in the second round. If the Flyers do get into trouble this series, the decision-making scenario on personnel should likely be a lot different than it is coming off of a 6-0 thrashing. Finally, as we're all well aware by now, another forward could get hurt at any time. With neither player cleared to return, the only pressing issue is winning game 2. 

The Flyers have really stepped up in the heart department to fill the Lappy void we weren't sure they could. They've also ratcheted up the scoring, and done so against two previously hot goalies. Hopefully that continues and there will be little rush to get these guys back on the ice.

Pot Kettle Powderkegs
Apparently a Montreal media member had his vehicle vandalized during game 1. I'm not going to get too deep in the manure on this one; if a reporter's car was vandalized, that sucks. Please don't do that. 

But I did find it groan-inducingly predictable that the opportunity was taken to make sweeping generalizations about any city's fanbase over a single incident once again (and a little odd that he didn't include pictures of said damage). After respectably including some references to the fact that just last series, the Montreal faithful tore up storefronts in their own city and looted, the reporter goes on to call Flyers fans are the ones in "Relentless pursuit of idiocy." I'm sorry that his car was vandalized, but the stuff he cites on the Flyers fan docket sounds a lot more isolated than the history the whole league knows Montreal fans have (link via Puck Daddy). 

Finally, he leans on the tired crutch of Santa Claus references. He made two of them, one his opener, and the second to close it out. They looted LAST WEEK in Montreal. The fanbase with the most Cups by far (although not as many recently) had to have the riot police brought in with tear gas and pepper spray because they advanced to the conference finals. The Santa Claus thing happened FOUR DECADES ago, and it was at an entirely different sport a little more than a year after the Flyers first came into the NHL. Trust me, isolated groups of Flyers fans have done a lot worse booing Santa, and a lot more recently. Same goes for most sporting cities, small towns, and anywhere else one group of people pits itself against another.

It's unfortunate if anything happened to his car, but rabble-rousing lines like the ones that begin and end the column evoke a picture of a guy grinning at the prospect of his next column, rather than sympathy for the plight of getting back into Canada wit'out a license plate. 

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