‘Man, they play hard’: John Tortorella’s Flyers flash work ethic not perfection in season-opening win

Midway through the second period of Thursday’s season opener against the New Jersey Devils at the Wells Fargo Center, with the score tied, 1-1, Flyers winger Joel Farabee attempted to chip the puck from the neutral zone down into the Devils’ end.

Devils defenseman Ryan Graves blocked the dump-in and reached his stick out to collect the puck in his skates, trying to continue to build on the Devils’ offensive momentum they had just created by peppering three unanswered shots on goalie Carter Hart in a span of a minute. What Graves didn’t see, however, was winger Nick Deslauriers barreling toward him.

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All 6-foot-1, 220 pounds of Deslauriers knocked Graves off the puck, putting the Flyers back on the attack. On the next shift, center Kevin Hayes made a nifty pass off the wall by the Devils’ blue line for winger Travis Konecny, who fired a wrist shot past goalie Mackenzie Blackwood to break the tie. Just 23 seconds later, center Morgan Frost’s one-timer from the slot beat Blackwood again, adding to what became a 5-2 Flyers win.

“I thought that revived us a little bit in the second period, and [we] grabbed ahold of it,” coach John Tortorella said of Deslauriers’ play. “We were losing ourselves a bit.”

It’s hard to lose yourself when you haven’t quite found yourself. The Flyers, just one game into an 82-game schedule with a new head coach and a roster teeming with players ages 25 and under, don’t yet have an identity. That, Tortorella said, typically reveals itself by December. But the Flyers started to forge one on Thursday night, rooted in the work ethic Tortorella demanded in training camp in an effort to make the Flyers a harder team to play against.

If Tortorella’s vision comes to fruition, the Flyers’ style of play will identify more with the toughness of Philadelphia and less with the unrelenting despair of their previous season. Their season opener featured far more grit than it did gloom.

“I think our mindset just keeps coming back to the camp and how it didn’t matter what was happening and how hard we were skating and what drill was next,” Konecny said. “It was just like, you just show up, you put your head down, you do the right things, you work hard, and that’s what we did. We just went out there and stuck to our game plan, and it paid off.”

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The work ethic manifested itself in the hits (28), the blocked shots (28), the countless shoves, and scrums. The Flyers brought the physicality, whether it came from the usual suspects like Deslauriers (three hits, one block) and workhorse defenseman Ivan Provorov (five hits, 10 blocks) or from less notoriously menacing players like Frost (three hits, three blocks). Newcomers Deslauriers and defenseman Tony DeAngelo hurled themselves into the centers of scrums throughout the night.

“Everybody blocked shots,” Provorov said. “Everybody took the hit when they needed to take the hit or pinned somebody against the boards when they needed to. So I think, overall, it was a great team effort.”

But for Tortorella, being a hard team to play against doesn’t always mean being the more physical team. Sometimes being a hard team to play against means playing with poise. When the Flyers went to the locker room for the second intermission up, 3-1, assistant coach Brad Shaw reminded the team of the difficulty of playing with a lead. When a team has a two-goal lead in their own building, they tend to play tentatively. Hard teams to play against fight through that hesitation and get back to their game.

In the third period, the Flyers rarely were hard to play against. Konecny scored an early power-play goal to put the Flyers up, 4-1, but the Devils responded and cut the Flyers’ lead to two on defenseman Damon Severson’s tally with half the period left to play. The Devils controlled the pace of play throughout the bulk of the final frame, racking up 22 shot attempts to the Flyers’ seven, according to Natural Stat Trick.

When the game isn’t going in a team’s favor, it takes poise to get the momentum swinging back in the right direction. The Flyers didn’t always appear poised in that third period, but they showed enough to bear down and earn the victory.

“I just want the team that plays against us to say, ‘Man, they play hard,’” Tortorella said. “Because I think in this league, if you’re true, and you’re honest, and you play hard, you find a way to get in the win column more often than not.”

Tortorella isn’t demanding 60 minutes of perfection. He isn’t apologizing for great goaltending — and goalie Carter Hart was mostly stellar (35 saves on 37 shots) after allowing the Devils’ first goal of the game to sneak through, especially when the Flyers started to get sloppy with the puck in their own zone.

He’s looking for the Flyers to work hard, take advantage of the momentum when they have it, and find ways to win. Thursday night was a start.