VOORHEES, N.J. - Wayne Simmonds isn't buying it. Just because half the defense is out for the season, and injuries have taken a toll up and down the Flyers' roster of late, Simmonds won't say that is what is behind the club's failure to play non-playoff-worthy hockey this season.
Why?
"I think we kind of screwed ourselves anyway," Simmonds said Wednesday. "We are missing a lot of bodies, but you can't make excuses. And had we played better earlier this season, we'd be in a better position and we wouldn't even be talking about the loss of the players we have now."
Flyers general manager Paul Holmgren added one to the messed-up mix on this day, saying Nick Grossmann will be the third regular defenseman in the past month to go out for the rest of the regular season. He joins Andrej Meszaros, who had season-ending surgery on his shoulder early this month, and Braydon Coburn, who has a shoulder separation and would likely return only if the Flyers make the playoffs.
You know, if they go 9-0 the rest of the way.
"We still have nine games left, so who knows?" Simmonds said. "There's no crystal ball. We could go 9-0, you don't know. But I don't really have an answer for it. ... It's obviously something we have to fix. We've got nine games left. We still have faith in ourselves."
So with fingers crossed, this Flyers team marches on down the stretch drive, which resumes Thursday night at Wells Fargo Center against the Ottawa Senators. And if they do so with smiles on their faces while singing "Kumbaya," well, all the better.
"I don't think too many guys in the room are happy," Simmonds said. "We're going to have to dig really, really, really deep from here on out."
Never mind how much time is left. It's likely not enough for the Flyers.
But going forward, just for the heck of it, what lessons are to be learned from this season on the stink?
Simmonds offered up one popular player choice: the old partial effort theory.
"It comes with the lack of playing hard for 60 minutes," Simmonds said in describing the team's play. "We've had 20, 30, 40, 50 ... not quite to the 60 minutes all the time. Obviously, if you're not playing 60 minutes in this league, you're probably not going to win games."
While failure to play the full 60 minutes has been a chronically cliche complaint from several players through the season, it finally seemed to set in that talking about the problem isn't the same thing as fixing it.
Perhaps it was the 4-1 loss to the Islanders Tuesday that enabled them to reach that conclusion.
Or maybe it was knowing the odds against them for making the playoffs have almost reached the insurmountable stage that sparked this revelation.
"Everyone was pissed off after the game," Kimmo Timonen said. "Today, everyone's in a bad mood. I think it was up and down. Both teams battled hard. A couple mistakes end up in our net. If you take those out, who knows what could have happened? That's what's been happening throughout the year. Those few mistakes, we lose games because of those. At the same time, when you score only one goal, it's hard to win with one goal."
That leads to the argument that maybe it's less about not playing up to their talent level for every minute of every game, and instead is about their talent level simply not being up to snuff.
Repeating his own familiar refrain about liking his young team, general manager Paul Holmgren shrugged that idea off.
Almost.
"I'm sure there will be some changes," Holmgren said. "I don't look at it like, `Holy mackerel, we've got to blow this up and start over again.' We've got a good group of young players here and some good older players that can be a part of it."
Asked if what was described as "big mistakes and little mistakes" that his team has made repeatedly had much to do with the club's youth, Holmgren said, "It's probably got something to do with that. But there's young teams in the league that are handling it better than we are. We just have to do better at it.
"Maybe we had lightning in the bottle last year that we don't this year, I don't know. It's a messed up year. We just started off poorly and couldn't recover. Now we're in a position where we just have to come up with something starting tomorrow."