Flyers Fourth Line has Given Team a Boost
VOORHEES — Pierre-Edouard Bellemare’s best guess of how loud a building gets in the playoffs is pretty close to Wednesday night’s win over the Washington Capitals.
Every time his line had a hit in the offensive zone, the crowd at Wells Fargo Center went nuts.
“That was unbelievable,” Bellemare said. “That was sick. When they started yelling the goaltender’s name and everything….goosebumps everywhere.”
Bellemare’s line with Chris VandeVelde and Ryan White has had just as much to do with the Flyers’ recent success as any other line.
“I think (coach Dave Hakstol) put a lot of confidence in us early,” White said. “He kept us together all year, which, for the way we play it’s nice to know where guys are. You can really read off of each other every night. Just staying with each other all year and having the confidence of the coach to go out there and do the right things and know you’re going to get rewarded, it’s a pretty easy thing to do.”
There were times that they haven’t played well this season and it looked even worse if the Flyers allowed a power play goal against because Bellemare and VandeVelde are key pieces of the Flyers’ penalty kill.
“We’ve gotten away from it at times,” White said. “He’s been there to kick us in the butt and get back to where we need to be.”
Earlier in the season they felt like they were grinding teams down and then making a line change where another unit comes on and scores a goal. They don’t get credited with an assist in that case, but feel like they earned one anyway. Recently they’ve felt the roles have flipped.
“We’ve been using the advantage of the other lines,” Bellemare said. “We come on the ice and maybe they go into a matchup and there’s an icing and the coach sends us and we’ve been successful with it. We don’t really think about it. We just play our game. We don’t really care who we play against.”