Flyers show some good, some bad in last-minute loss to Vegas. It was a microcosm of what they are.

LAS VEGAS — Noah Cates hunched over a table inside the Flyers’ locker room, and as he turned away from the stat sheet he was reading, the 24-year-old center shook his head in disgust.

“Faceoffs,” Cates said when asked what had him irritated after the Flyers fell to the defending Stanley Cup champion Golden Knights, 3-2, late Tuesday night at T-Mobile Arena.

It’s something the team’s promising two-way center looks at after every game. It’s an area he wanted to emphasize in his second full season with the Flyers. On this night, Cates won seven and lost 15. Two games earlier, when the Flyers dominated Connor McDavid and the Edmonton Oilers, Cates won 11 of his 15 draws.

“I just think those 50/50s, a little more muscle or something to have them go my way really does go a long way,” Cates said. “You just have the puck a little more and you’re not chasing it.”

For the final 25-plus minutes Tuesday night, that’s all the Flyers were doing. For nearly two full periods, they had outplayed a team that four months ago paraded the Stanley Cup around town and started this season by winning six — now seven — straight. But then everything changed, and in some ways, it was a microcosm of who these Flyers are and what they will be. There will be plenty of good, maybe more than a lot of people expected. There also will be plenty of bad.

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Entering Tuesday night, Vegas had played 18 periods of hockey and hadn’t been trailing at the end of any of them. That changed Tuesday. Vegas tallied the first goal seven minutes into the game, but the Flyers roared back, starting with Cates’ first goal of the season. Then the Flyers got a little puck luck when Cam Atkinson skated down the left wing and flicked a backhander on goal. The puck hit backup goalie Logan Thompson’s blocker and then bounced past him.

The Flyers had a lead and were the better team, and that continued into the second period. The Flyers were outhitting a big, physical Vegas team. They were winning puck battles and driving play. With Sean Couturier and Atkinson back healthy, they continue to show a forward group that can be dangerous at times and certainly deeper. And on the heels of largely outplaying the Dallas Stars on Saturday and earning a tough road point, it looked like the Flyers were about to make it four straight strong performances against some of the best teams in the Western Conference.

Midway through the second period, though, the Flyers started playing on their heels. Vegas was winning faceoffs, controlling the puck in the Flyers’ end, and peppering Carter Hart, who was stellar. The Flyers had just one shot on goal in the final eight minutes of the second period.

That 2-1 Flyers lead held until 23-year-old defenseman Egor Zamula was made into a highlight reel by Paul Cotter, who got around Zamula by dragging the puck between his own legs before putting a shot past Hart. It tied the score, 2-2, with just under eight minutes to go in the third period.

Another difficult road point was still on the table, but 22-year-old defenseman Cam York later tried to skate around a Vegas player in his own end and turned the puck over, causing the Flyers to break down and eventually get beaten by a Shea Theodore goal with 33 seconds on the clock on a shot Hart said he never saw because of a screen.

A visibly frustrated York took responsibility for the end result.

“It was not the time to be trying to dance somebody,” he said. “Should have just chipped it [out] and lived to fight another day.”

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These are the growing pains Flyers coach John Tortorella knows the Flyers will go through. In training camp he referred to the potential “horror shows” the Flyers might have with their young group of defensemen.

“You just wish you’d get a point,” Tortorella said. “We just can’t try to beat someone. That’s what starts that whole fiasco at the end. Situational play, understanding momentums of games. I think if we just move that puck and get it in deep and allow ourselves to forecheck, we at least get a point. Instead, we’re running around our own end zone.”

Spend too much time doing that against a team like Vegas, and you’re bound to give up a few goals and be on the wrong side of what mostly was a 50/50 game.

“You don’t want to be on your heels,” Tortorella said. “I think some of our younger players felt it a little bit. These are the lessons we’re going to have to go through. But also some really good things from a lot of players, too.

“In the third period there, you spend that much time, you see some of the breakdowns. We’re going to live through it. We have to live through it. We’re going to go through situations like that that guys just aren’t ready for. So we’ll go through the mistakes. They’ll learn from them and try to get better.”

That’s really all this season is about, but through six games, there are encouraging signs that a path to improvement exists.

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