Philly Sports Today

For the first two periods, it was the same old story for Antero Niittymaki and rest of the Flyers against the Atlanta Thrashers–Philly puts points on the board, while Hotlanta continuously comes up empty. Then the Thrashers decided to make a game of it and completely erased a three-goal deficit before the Flyers finally got it together late in the period to escape with a 5-3 win.

The Flyers took the early lead when Scott Hartnell scored about halfway through the first period. Darroll Powe pushed Philly’s advantage late in the period to 2-0 with his second career NHL goal. Early in the second, the Flyers appeared to have an insurmountable lead when Randy Jones found the net for the first time this year, but things certainly became interesting in the game’s final frame. Eric Perrin, lya Kovalchuk, and Chris Thorburn each lit the lamp in the opening 10:49 of the third period as the Thrashers quickly made up a huge deficit and looked poise to defeat Niittymaki for the first time ever. However, Mike Knuble refused to stand for any of Atlanta’s nonsense. Knuble provided an answer to Atlanta only 1:23 after Thorburn’s goal to put Philly back on top and he also scored an empty-netter in the waning moments of the game to secure the victory.

With the exception of the first 10:49 of the third period, Niittymaki was pretty solid, making 28 saves. The win gives Niitty a 12-0-0 all-time record against the Thrashers. Overall, Philly is 25-4-6 all-time against Atlanta. Thrashers netminder Kari Lehtonen also had 28 stops.

Heading into the All-Star break, the Flyers have a record of 25-12-9, which is good for 59 points in the standings. However, the Flyers are only in third place in the Atlantic Division and are currently in sixth place in the Eastern Conference. The good news for Philly is that they’re only two points behind the Atlantic Division-leading New Jersey, but the Devils have played one more game.

Philly also received some bad news yesterday when they learned that Danny Briere will undergo exploratory surgery due to lingering discomfort in his groin and stomach area. He is expected to miss another two weeks. It’s pretty unfortunate that for all the money that Briere is being paid, he has only played in nine games this season. What makes that worse is that the Flyers were only 2-4-3 in those games. Maybe Briere being out for another two weeks won’t be so bad after all.

The Flyers will kick off the unofficial second half of the season on Tuesday when they travel down to Miami for the second time in 12 days to take on the Florida Panthers. In their last meeting, the Flyers claimed a 3-2 shootout win.

Let’s Go Flyers!

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