Flyers wear down Blackhawks with an easy 4-1 victory

Seven months after the Stanley Cup Finals were decided in the Blackhawks' favor, it's the Philadelphia Flyers looking like the better team now.

For certain the Flyers are the deeper team and they showed it on Sunday at the United Center, wearing down the Hawks in a tidy 4-1 win in the first meeting between the two teams since last June's six-game Final.

“Well, you look at the guys that are out of their lineup, really,” Flyers defenseman Chris Pronger said when asked his opinion of the Hawks. “Their third line, you have (Andrew) Ladd and (Kris) Versteeg out of there, and (Dustin) Byfuglien off the top line. It's just depth that they've lost and they're filling in with some younger guys.”

It was an OK weekend for the Hawks, but with the season winding down and a playoff spot hardly secured, OK is not going to cut it.

As well as the Hawks played in Saturday's 4-1 win at Detroit, their performance on Sunday left as much to be desired.

“We obviously didn't have the speed or the tempo to our game like we did (Saturday),” captain Jonathan Toews said. “We were too easy to defend. We weren't on the same page with each other and that made it hard to be predictable, especially in the offensive zone when it was time to capitalize on some of our chances.

“When you come out flat against a team like that, it's not going to be easy to come back.”

The Hawks outshot the Flyers 11-9 in a scoreless first period, but they put only 20 shots on rookie goalie Sergei Bobrovsky the rest of the way.

Marian Hossa scored the only Hawks goal on a penalty shot in the third period after it was 3-0 for the Flyers.

Philadelphia took over the game in the second period and put the screws to the Hawks defensively.

“They were trapping when we had the puck in our zone,” Hossa said. “They had almost all five guys in the neutral zone just waiting for our mistakes.

“Sometimes we tried to beat them with one guy and that didn't work. It was really tough to get through that middle zone.”

The Flyers got the only goal of the second period 49 seconds in from Jeff Carter off a wild scramble. The Hawks got little accomplished after that.

“The bottom line is they started to outwork us a little bit,” Hawks defenseman Niklas Hjalmarsson said. “They played real good at the same time we didn't.

“Philly is a real good team so if you have a couple bad moments out there, they're going to score on you.”

The Flyers put the game away early in the third period on goals by Nikolai Zherdev and Carter that came after sloppy defensive work by the Hawks.

“They're at the top of the league for a reason,” Hawks coach Joel Quenneville said of the 32-12-5 Flyers. “They've got a lot of weapons.”

The Hawks finished with 31 shots on goal, but few of them were difficult for Bobrovsky.

“I think we were a little too easy on their entire team,” Toews said. “He's a good goaltender, no doubt, but he's not unbeatable and not one of those guys you're too worried about. But if you give any goaltender in this league time and space to see everything they're going to make a lot of stops out there. That's kind of the way it went.”

Tim Sassone's game tracker

<b>Three stars

<b>1. Jeff Carter, Flyers: </b>Plus-4 with 2 goals and an assist.

<b>2. Claude Giroux, Flyers: </b>Plus-4 with 4 assists.

<b>3. Chris Pronger, Flyers: </b>Led the way defensively, blocking 3 shots and playing almost 23 minutes.

<b>Dominating day</b>

Philadelphia's line of Jeff Carter, Claude Giroux and Nikolai Zherdev combined for 3 goals, 9 assists and together were plus-11.

<b>Forget it</b>

The Hawks' power play was 0-for-2 with 1 shot on goal.