Highlights Beyond Highlights- Jan. 5 vs. Maple Leafs

The Flyers had a solid defensive game for most of the night against a very good Maple Leafs team, save for one or two moments in the first period. Here’s a look at two plays that were part of that effort.

Noah Cates has been a remarkable force all over the ice for the past several weeks. This is a high-up look at a play he made in the first period because it wasn’t anything that normal television footage would pick up. Cates is prepared to defend the neutral zone and is indicated by the red circle that starts near the defensive blue line. During this time, the puck is back in the Toronto zone and is last handled by the left-side defenseman, indicated briefly by the black circle. He wants to feed it up the near wall to a forward at the Flyers blue line. Cates picks up on this immediately, and rushes to get into the passing lane; he anticipates it in enough time to completely intercept the play and send it back in the other direction.

The Flyers made things difficult on Toronto’s top line for much of the night, at times forcing them to spend their shifts defending instead of attacking. Here’s a spot where Jamie Drysdale hounds Auston Matthews before finally stripping him of the puck and heading in the offensive direction.

Finally, here’s a look at Laughton’s goal. This is of course a great pass from Sean Couturier, but what we look at here is Laughton’s path to the net. Laughton is coming down the right side as a left-handed shot, so he’s got to open himself up to a certain extent if he wants to get a shot on net; however, Morgan Rielly is in a good spot to take that away. To elude this, Laughton changes his path to come around behind the defenseman instead of going straight to the net, and that allows him to get the stick in between Rielly and the net to direct the puck on goal and through the goaltender. On an ordinary straight path, this just goes right through to the corner, or riccochets ineffectively to the end boards.