The Flyers entered Saturday night's game riding high on the heels of their fourth straight win in overtime on Friday night. Their opponent on Saturday was the team with the fewest points in the NHL, the Columbus Blue Jackets.
So naturally, it was time for a total clunker from the Flyers. With the exception of a rush orchestrated by Shayne Gostisbehere, which led to the lone Flyers goal by Michael Raffl, the Flyers didn't look anything like a team that had won four straight games.
The 4-1 loss snapped their four-game streak and seemingly popped all the questions surrounding the team back into the picture.
"We just got away from it tonight in every area of the game," head coach Dave Hakstol said. "We’ve been successful through everybody going at a high level through 60 minutes and we didn’t do it tonight. Bottom line."
"It was definitely one of those nights," Steve Mason said. "We didn’t have the overall game that we needed in order to win the hockey game. That is why we are on the losing end. You look at the way that we have played in the last few games and how strong our overall game was and that is why we came out on top. Tonight we didn’t bring enough elements to our game to be successful."
Mason is now riding a six-game losing streak at home with his last win coming on Oct. 24.
Mason was really the reason the Flyers even had a chance. Before Nick Foligno's second goal of the game made it 3-1 in the second, the Flyers were being badly outshot, trailing in that category, 13-4, after 20 minutes and 28-17 after 40 minutes.
The Flyers also made things relatively easy on Sergei Bobrovsky. Working in his eighth straight game and with the Blue Jackets riding an emotional low, the Flyers failed to capitalize early with one of their poorer efforts of the season. It was also one of the Blue Jackets best.
"I thought it was probably one of our most complete games," Columbus head coach John Tortorella said, "through the lineup, through all the areas of the game, all the areas of our concept. It’s a good answer after a bad performance last night."
"From the start of the game we didn’t come out the way we wanted to," Wayne Simmonds said. "We didn’t play inspired hockey."
In what was a very positive stretch for the Flyers, that also had them climbing back in the standings, this is a huge step back. For one, it's a game where the Flyers let the opponent dictate the effort. Secondly, it halts the momentum of a terrific week, and the Flyers get two days before the next game to wallow in an effort they would like to have back.
But those two days will be certainly used for improving the effort from Saturday night's pathetic showing.
"We’re going to go back to the drawing table and see some video on what we did wrong," Simmonds said. "It’s up to us to correct it. One loss is enough, we got to get back in the win column. We’ve been playing pretty good hockey but tonight wasn’t acceptable and I think we all know that."
"I believe we will come back to work," Hakstol said. "We’ve got to go and prove that as we move forward. I’m not quite to that point yet. We don’t like the way tonight went, but at the end of the day you’ve got to go back to work tomorrow. That’s the bottom line. We’re not going to try to make this one look prettier than it was."
Kevin Durso is managing editor for Flyerdelphia. Follow him on Twitter @Kevin_Durso.
