EDMONTON, Alberta _ The Edmonton Oilers broke out their orange jerseys against the Flyers Friday night, in what was clearly overkill.
The Flyers don't need any help passing it to the other team.
The parade of defensive zone lapses and mid-ice miscues continued for this struggling, tied-for-last-place in the Eastern Conference team, as they fell to the Oilers, 4-1, Friday night at Rogers Place.
"In this league, you give the puck away, you give it back to the other team, you're gonna get hurt," Flyers coach Dave Hakstol was saying prior to the game. "Not only are you taking it away from yourself offensively because you don't have the puck. But you give teams back the puck that transition well, they're gonna hurt you. It's a pretty simple game. The more you have the puck the better it is. The harder you are to take it from.
"That's been our issue the last half dozen games. We haven't consistently through the 60 minutes taken care of the puck or been hard enough with it."
If you start with the 6-0 loss in Toronto on Nov.24 that triggered Ron hextall's dismissal, and include Friday night's loss, it has been eight games now. Eight games in which the Flyers have allowed 34 goals.
Incredibly perhaps is that they have won two games in that span, and if not for that last-minute collapse in Calgary on Wednesday, it could have been three. This despite their power play being filed with the Missing Persons Bureau (0 for 5 Friday night), and despite what has now become a nightly juggling of lines by Hakstol as he vainly seeks a spark.
The Oilers, who had lost in overtime the previous night in Winnipeg, scored their first goal Friday after the Flyers coughed up a puck in their own end. Two defensemen were caught on one side of the ice, Travis Konecny and James van Riemsdyk were in no-man's land, and Connor McDavid found Alex Chiasson alone in the slot to make it 1-0 at 12:37.
They made it 2-0 at 12:37 of the second after Shayne Gostisbehere lost a puck to McDavid as both chased it to the corner, looking on helplessly as McDavid retrieved a rebound from behind the net and banked it off Anthony Stolarz as he tried to regroup from his first save.
They pushed it to 3-0 less than two minutes later, Adam Larsson's shot lacing through three Flyers bodies and past Stolarz, who appeared to be screened.
The Flyers finally came alive in what had been a comparably sleepy third period, mounting their most sustained pressure. After Dale Weise missed a great chance in the slot and rang the post, Sean Couturier deflecting Jake Voracek;s shot from the high slot at 10:03.
As they had in the first period, the Flyers outshot the Oilers in the final period. But the bouts of disorganization ... well they looked a little like the Edmonton Oilers less than a month ago, before they fired Todd McLellan and pulled 66-year-old Ken Hitchcock out of retirement to replace him.
They are 9-2-2 since.
The Oilers have now outscored opponents, 24-13, over their last six games. Both Mikko Koskinen and Cam Talbot have seen their save percentages increase dramatically, and the Oilers have surged into the second wild-card spot of the Western Conference.
As for the Flyers, they seem lost right now, tied at the bottom of the Eastern Conference with New Jersey and Florida. "There's been a lot of segments of games where we've played really well," Hakstol said. "We've got to fill up some of the little holes and some of the inconsistencies. When we do that it's a confident group that we know we can push back in the right direction. But time is short."
Sure is. Maybe too short.
