Rick Tocchet’s\u00a0Philadelphia Flyers (0-4-2) are home on Sunday to take on Rod Brind’Amour’s Carolina Hurricanes (4-1-1).\u00a0The Flyers are still in search of their first win of the young 2026-27 season.<\/p>\n
Game time at Xfinity Mobile Arena is 7:00 p.m. EDT. The game will be broadcast on NBCSP and NHL Network.<\/p>\n
This is the second of four meetings between the Flyers and Hurricanes this season. It’s the second and final one in Philadelphia. The teams will rematch in Raleigh on January 15 and April 5.<\/p>\n
On October 3, a tremendous goaltending performance from Joseph Woll enabled the Flyers to take one point. Unfortunately, the Hurricanes prevailed in overtime, 3-2. Owen Tippett and Matvei Michkov scored in regulation\u00a0for the Flyers, who took a 2-1 lead into the third period. Former Flyers defenseman Shayne Gostisbehere netted the overtime winner on a power play goal after Philly failed to convert their own OT power play.<\/p>\n
On Saturday afternoon, the Flyers were on the wrong end of a 5-1 score in Boston. Porter Martone scored Philly’s lone goal, temporarily cutting a three-goal deficit to 3-1 in the third period.<\/p>\n
The Hurricanes, meanwhile, have won four games in a row. They are coming off a 5-2 road win in Chicago on Saturday. Jackson Blake and Jordan Martinook each had a goal and an assist. Sebastian Aho (shorthanded) also scored, while Mark Jankowski scored for the third straight game. Brandon Bussi earned the win in goal with 24 saves.<\/p>\n
Look for Woll\u00a0to oppose Pyotr Kochetkov in goal on Sunday. The two played against each other in Philadelphia last weekend.<\/p>\n
Here are the RAV4 Things to watch on Sunday evening.<\/p>\n
1. Puck management<\/p>\n
The Hurricanes are the NHL’s best puck possession team, year in and year out. They dominated that facet in the previous game against the Flyers this month.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the Flyers have struggled considerably to get — and retain — the puck in five of the six games so far. The lone exception was Thursday’s game in Ottawa.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Flyers have lost far more 50-50 puck battles than they’ve won. Meanwhile, they’ve been plagued by turnovers including 22 giveaways against Boston on Saturday. Philadelphia wilted quickly against the Bruins’ high-pressure forecheck. The Flyers also committed numerous unforced turnovers.<\/p>\n
2. East-West plays<\/p>\n
One of the Flyers’ biggest strengths last season was defending lateral plays in their defensive zone and shutting off attempted backdoor set ups. They also took away attacking lanes through the middle.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That has not been the case through six games this season. For the Flyers to turn things around, they need to fix their defensive zone play immediately.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, after the Olympic break last season, the Flyers were one of the NHL’s stingiest teams through the neutral zone. They did a fine job at preventing clean entries and in forcing turnovers that led to transition chances.<\/p>\n
That, too, has not been in evidence this season. Much of the talk about the team, understandably, has been about the Flyers’ offensive woes. However, things that create counterattacking\u00a0chances in the first place have to be fixed before Philly even gets transition offensive chances.<\/p>\n
3. Entries and retrievals<\/p>\n
This is yet another area — an offensive facet, in this case — where the Flyers have been woefully inadequate early this season. The team has struggled to move up ice with pace as a connected five-man unit. The\u00a0head-man passing\u00a0 has been subpar. Quick-up plays have been few and far between.\u00a0<\/p>\n
When a club fails to execute 15-foot to 18-foot passes with precision, it becomes very hard to attack with pace on the rush. Instead, plays get broken up or turned over in dangerous areas.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Alas, the other means of generating attack — putting the puck behind the defense and either retrieving it with pace (Carolina’s specialty) or physically winning a small-area battle to come away with the puck — has been a struggle, too.<\/p>\n
The result is that either the puck never gets over the attacking blueline at all or it’s a quick one-and-done sequence that puts Philly right back on the defensive.\u00a0<\/p>\n
4. The physical game<\/p>\n
Something rare (and unwelcomed) happened in the Boston game on Saturday.\u00a0 Normally, when a team gets outshot by a wide margin, the club registers more hits than the other side.<\/p>\n
That was not the case on Saturday. Credited hits in Boston favored the Bruins by a 25-21 margin.\u00a0 That speaks to an inadequate competitiveness level overall.<\/p>\n
It should be noted that shot attempts favored Boston by a 64-37 margin on Saturday.\u00a0 Again, this speaks to being too easy to play against when the Flyers even got outhit under these conditions.<\/p>\n
The Flyers blocked 18 Bruins shot attempts. One would normally expect more blocks given the number of shot attempts. This plays back into the open lanes the Bruins had available.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rick Tocchet’s\u00a0Philadelphia Flyers (0-4-2) are home on Sunday to take on Rod Brind’Amour’s Carolina Hurricanes (4-1-1).\u00a0The Flyers are…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":304509,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[69,71,70],"class_list":["post-304508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304508","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=304508"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304508\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/304509"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=304508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=304508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=304508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}