Carter Hart has become one of the Flyers’ biggest concerns. Who expected that? | Mike Sielski

First Michael Dal Colle from the left circle, then Sebastian Aho from the right, and on each shot, on each of the first two Islanders goals Thursday night, Carter Hart seemed as if he had just stood in front of Rick Moranis’s laser contraption and shrunk himself smaller than an ant.

The Flyers had been brilliant for two periods at the Nassau Coliseum, had built a three-goal lead, had gone a long way to wiping away the bitter memory of that nine-goal humiliation Wednesday night at Madison Square Garden. And Hart gave Dal Colle a whole mess of net to hit, waving a slow glove hand at a shot he could have stopped and didn’t. And he crouched as Aho flicked a shot off Travis Sanheim’s stick, a shot that sailed over Hart and into the net’s upper corner.

Now the Flyers were hanging their heads. Now they were wondering, What the hell, as they tend to do against the Islanders, and Oliver Wahlstrom’s tying goal, just 34 seconds after Aho scored, was as predictable as it was inexcusable, with Claude Giroux leaving him open at the side of the net.

At least that last one wasn’t Hart’s fault, and at least Oskar Lindblom, with his late goal in a 4-3 victory, rescued the Flyers from an embarrassment that would have surpassed Wednesday’s. But the problems that have hounded the Flyers for most of this season were still present and prominent in Thursday’s third period: the shaky defense, the tentative play, the unreliable goaltending worst of all.

Hart’s regression has been the most surprising part of this strange Flyers season. Even as often as his teammates burp up the puck in front of him, no one would have expected an ugly .880 save percentage through his first 19 games. No one would have expected everyone in the organization acknowledging that Hart isn’t in the best place mentally. He has excelled at every level during his climb to the NHL, establishing himself as the best goaltender in the Canadian Hockey League, winning a gold medal for Canada at the World Juniors. Yet at the moment, he’s a shadow of the goalie he was last season, when his .926 postseason save percentage was the primary reason that the Flyers came within one win of the Eastern Conference Finals.

» READ MORE: Flyers rebound from nightmare loss and stun Islanders, 4-3

“Just chipping away at things right now,” he said, “getting back to playing my game and trusting the game I’ve built. And I think it’s coming. It’s going in the right direction. Like I said there, I’ve just got to build off it.”

He can think it’s coming. He can hope it’s coming. But the big concern is where it’s at now. During the Flyers telecast on NBC Sports Philadelphia, Keith Jones referenced Hart’s “confidence issues in net,” and as much of a truth teller as Jones can be (and the Flyers allow him to be), the casual manner in which he said it was still jarring. Nobody’s hiding this. Nobody’s soft-pedaling the falloff in Hart’s play.

Coach Alain Vigneault said that Hart is “trying to find his game,” which is the thing coaches say when their goaltenders are struggling, as if Hart’s game had fallen through a hole in his pocket and was lying on the street somewhere between South Philadelphia and Uniondale, N.Y.

“It’s like with anybody who’s going through a challenging moment during whether it be a season or his career. You keep pushing. You keep working. You keep battling,” Vigneault said. “We expect Carter to push and battle, and he’s going to continue to work on his game. You can never forget that Carter’s a very young goaltender, and he’s learning the game. He’s learning the aspect of the toughest position in the game, in my estimation.”

Sure, his youth — he’s still just 22 — and the ragged play of the team’s defensemen are mitigating factors, but they’re not the entire story. In this COVID-revamped season, the Eastern Division is a doozy, with the Bruins and the Capitals and the Islanders and the Penguins, so the Flyers were never going to cruise into the playoffs.

But it was reasonable to expect them to qualify, and Hart’s presence and his presumed improvement were supposed to be decisive factors over some or all of those clubs. Except the Flyers’ defense got worse, and so has he, and now they’re in fifth place in their division and nothing is guaranteed, not even a solid and complete night of competence from Hart.

» READ MORE: The Flyers need Carter Hart to keep being great, but his idol’s past proves that’s no guarantee | Mike Sielski

“Definitely needed to make some more saves in the third period,” he said, “so they didn’t come back at the end of the game. But at the end of the day, got the two points, and it’s something to keep building off of, for all of us.”

Keep building? The season is half over, and in his last seven games, Carter Hart has stopped just 83% of the shots he has faced. The building has to begin first, before his team runs out of time.