Sam Donnellon: Flyers tough to figure

THE PHILADELPHIA Flyers have become the riddle you stump your friends with, the puzzle that doesn't seem to quite fit on your table, the nursery rhyme that makes sense on one line, and seems absurd the next.

Indeed, head coach Peter Laviolette seemed to channel his inner Dr. Seuss after an optional practice yesterday when he described his team's goal-allowing schizophrenia this way:

"You're coming off a weekend where it was high;

"Seems we're letting in one or letting in five."

But it's not only about a lost weekend. And it's not only about a lost goalie, or even two. The Flyers have lost 16 games in regulation this season and in nine of those, they have surrendered five or more goals. That's one argument against believing that, even if this past weekend had turned out better, they are really anywhere near the league's elite teams. Their 156 goals allowed is 54 more than the Rangers, who have played two fewer games. It is 45 more than the Boston Bruins. If the eight Eastern Conference playoffs teams were determined today, only the Ottawa Senators would have allowed more goals among them than the Flyers.

And although Laviolette also said yesterday "You're not going to win many games when you're letting in that many goals," and that there were "lots of different things we can do better than we did over the weekend," it was also made clear that there will no detour from team philosophy.

"You look at Tampa Bay, you look at Montreal, you look at Washington even now," Danny Briere said after he practiced in full yesterday. "The Rangers and Devils are also playing that way. Those are teams that really sit back and wait for the opposition to come at them. We're a team that's aggressive. We're going after it. We don't sit back. It's part of the reason why we give up more goals against, but we also score more. It all depends upon the system you're playing."

Laviolette has reason to believe in this system. The Flyers allowed 225 goals in the 2009-2010 regular season, only 11 fewer than they scored, then beat three teams that had allowed fewer on the way to the Stanley Cup finals. And when Laviolette's Carolina team won the Cup in 2006, it entered the playoffs with 260 goals allowed, seven more than the league average.