By Hillary Stephens
The Flyers are in San Jose tonight and they need to beat the Sharks for a couple of reasons:
“Just because we won 10 in a row, that doesn’t mean anything for us,” Brayden Schenn (above) told the Courier Post. “It’s gotta be important for us not to give back the points we gained there because we didn’t have a great start to the year. We played some good hockey there, but ever since we lost the one where we snapped the streak we’ve kind of sat back a little too much and we thought it was going to be easier than it is.”
They have two games left in California before returning home from the road and can hold onto their position if they win.
“We gotta get our points whenever we can,” said Wayne Simmonds, who notched his 17th goal of the season Wednesday. “That was our 37th game of the year. We’ve still got over half the season to go. Obviously we want to get as many points as we can, but we’re not panicking or anything like that.
“We’re fine. We just gotta make sure we’re better than what we did tonight.”
There are 45 games remaining in the season, a bit more than half, but the Christmas break typically signifies the unofficial midway point and some teams start taking inventory of where they stack up against the competition.
“We don’t like to look at other teams. I think we just worry about ourselves,” Shayne Gostisbehere said. “That worked for us last year. It’s something that has to be ingrained in our minds, that it’s all about us and not about anyone else. We want to create our own destiny and when we give away points like that and fall on our face in the third period, it’s not going to happen. We’re going to regroup and come back stronger.”
