Konecny returns, Tortorella watches away from bench and Flyers lose to Sabres originally appeared on NBC Sports Philadelphia
The Flyers were handed a lopsided, 6-3 loss Saturday night by the Sabres at the Wells Fargo Center.
The defeat snapped the club’s season-best point streak at seven games (5-0-2).
The Flyers (29-33-13) have lost two straight games and have seven remaining.
Morgan Frost played like the Flyers’ best and most dangerous player, scoring two of the club’s goals. Since the calendar turned to 2023, Frost leads the Flyers in points with 27 (11 goals, 16 assists) over 38 games. He has 41 points on the season (18 goals, 23 assists).
“Just trying to string good games together,” Frost said. “I think that’s the thing for me is kind of consistency.”
The Flyers went 2-1-0 against the Sabres (37-31-7) in their three-game regular-season series.
Alex Tuch led Buffalo’s offensive outburst with a hat trick, punctuating the performance at shorthanded to finish off the game. The Sabres are trying to make a push for the Eastern Conference’s second wild-card spot.
• After missing the previous 16 games with an upper-body injury, Travis Konecny was back in the lineup and scored the Flyers’ third goal.
“T.K., for not having played in quite a while, seemed to get better and better as the game went on,” Flyers associate coach Brad Shaw said.
While the Flyers saw the return of Konecny, they will not see Sean Couturier (back) this season. It was an organizational decision. The 30-year-old center was frustrated with it but accepted it. More on that here.
“I can imagine it’s frustrating for Cootsy,” Konecny said Saturday morning. “He’s an athlete, he wants to play, he wants to be in, he’s a competitor. Seeing how hard he trained and what he was trying to do to get back in the lineup is definitely what guys should be following. Because if everyone wants to play that bad, then we’ll have a good thing going here.”
• Felix Sandstrom made his third straight start and finished with 23 saves.
During the second period, Buffalo flipped the game upside down on the Flyers. The Sabres went off for three goals in the span of 2:21 minutes and then added a fourth to make it 5-1.
“I think we got a little loose,” Shaw said. “We have to remember you can create offense by playing disciplined and playing the right way.
“They’re a team that can hurt you. They have a ton of skill, they’ve got a lot of prolific scorers. In that small window, we sort of, in retrospect, pretty much gave the game away.”
Frost’s second goal drew the Flyers within three before second intermission.
In the morning, Samuel Ersson was recalled on emergency conditions to back up Sandstrom.
Carter Hart, nursing a lower-body injury, rehabbed in the morning at Flyers Training Center. The 24-year-old netminder is still day to day. Cam Atkinson, recovering from neck surgery, was also on the ice, working toward a return for next season.
Buffalo netminder Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen stopped 39 of the Flyers’ 42 shots.
• For a second straight game, John Tortorella was not behind the Flyers’ bench.
On Thursday in Ottawa, Ontario, Tortorella handed the clipboard to Shaw, while the head coach evaluated from the visiting management booth alongside interim general manager Danny Briere.
With Briere on the road and not at Saturday night’s game, Tortorella didn’t watch from the management suite. Instead, he watched on video from the locker room area. He joked in the morning that the bird’s-eye view was not exactly his favorite vantage point.
“It sucks up there,” Tortorella said. “I didn’t learn a thing up there. That is answer alley because everybody has the answer up there because it’s so slow.”
Tortorella said he wanted to give his assistants a chance to lead within the game.
“I just think it gives them a chance to develop and see the bench at that spectrum,” he said. “I think it’s my responsibility.”
Tortorella plans to be behind the bench again this season.
“It was really good for Danny and I because we got to converse,” Tortorella said. “We got to converse about style of play, what’s going on with certain plays. We got to converse on personnel. It’s the most him and I were able to sit down and talk about the future of the team.
“We did some evaluating. It gave me and my general manager [an opportunity] to talk about that specific player on that specific play. And maybe one of the conversations was, ‘Yeah, it’s a habit of his, we’re trying to get him out of it.’ Those are the type of conversations and evaluations we had. Especially with me sitting next to my general manager, I thought it was really healthy for him and I.”
• Before and during the game, the Flyers honored beloved radio broadcaster Steve Coates, who is retiring after 43 seasons with the organization.
In warmups, the Flyers wore No. 43 jerseys with “Coatesy” on the nameplate.
The organization held a pregame ceremony in which it provided Coates with a commemorative Flyers golf cart and announced the renaming of the bar at the arena’s inside edge lounge as “Coatesy’s Corner.”
The beloved Coates expressed his gratitude in a speech, thanking the fans for an “amazing, amazing ride.”
“That’s a positive from tonight,” Konecny said. “They did a great job with the ceremony and letting Coatesy talk. We wouldn’t want it any other way than to listen to him go on a little rant there, so that was awesome.”
• The Flyers are right back at it Sunday when they visit the Penguins (6 p.m. ET/NBCSP+).
They’re 2-10-1 in the second game of back-to-back sets.
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