April 08, 2024
Eric Hartline/USA TODAY Sports
Sam Ersson has logged heavy minutes for the Flyers this season.
As the season wore on and as the Flyers went deeper and deeper into the playoff race, John Tortorella always remained hyper-aware of the heavy minutes Samuel Ersson was logging in goal, the toll it was going to take on him, but also the circumstances for why he had to play him so much.
So when the head coach sat down to meet with the local media on Monday, after his team fell flat in a crucial back-to-back over the weekend to leave them on the outside looking in of the postseason chase, he didn't mince words or dance around the situation in goal.
He was real about it.
Ersson was never supposed to play this much going into the season and Ivan Fedotov, the current backup, wasn't supposed to play so soon after his arrival over from Russia.
Carter Hart's leave of absence from the organization in January to face sexual assault charges tied to the 2018 Hockey Canada scandal threw a massive wrench in everything, in a situation that, to be perfectly clear, is far, far more serious than hockey.
But the Flyers did have to continue on, and Ersson, who had already been earning a good chunk of the starts by that point, answered the call and kept on doing so because between Cal Petersen and Felix Sandström – and up until Fedotov got to the team just over a week ago – there were no other dependable options behind him.
It had to be him, even as he's been struggling of late.
"Everybody throws the numbers that are out there and the numbers are bad, right?" Tortorella said after practice Monday from the Flyers Training Center in Voorhees. "But we're not even talking about these games meaning anything for us if Ers doesn't play the way he's played. Then I throw Ivan in in a situation, coming – who knows where the hell he came from and he has to play a game."
"We had Ers penciled in at maybe playing 18-22 games this year, look where he's at now. So there's no blaming. It's just, let's face it, things got thrown into a really weird situation when we lost Carter. But having said that, we had discussions in the summer about the situation with Carter and figured something was gonna go on, right? And we gotta be honest about it. It's not a great situation for our team when we lost him, but it showed me a lot of good things about a specific guy in Ers and how he handled it. But it's been a lot.
"I made the decision – I made the decision – that I'm gonna live or die with Ers when I played him all those games. I did not have the confidence, and it's certainly not a criticism, it's just my assement of Sandy...I just – I made the decision that we're going with Ers because I think he deserved it, and I've played the hell out of him, and he's tired. But I think – I watched him in the Columbus game and I saw him battle. I saw a different guy. Again, six go in, but a little bit of that was the play in front of him. "
But just as much the miles the 24-year old has racked up, too.
From the start of the season up until the February 27 win over Tampa Bay at home, Ersson looked solid and comfortable in goal even as his playing time rapidly increased into that of a No. 1 netminder. Through 33 games, he went 17-11-4 with three shutouts and a .901 save percentage, which was a mark that was more than good enough to keep the Flyers in a lot of games.
But as the calendar flipped to March, and struggles, injuries, and losses overall began to pile up for the Flyers, Ersson took a downswing, too.
His minutes kept climbing and his pace of 47 games and counting this season has already set a career high over the number he played up with the Flyers (12) and down with the Lehigh Valley Phantoms in the AHL (42) last year.
He's playing more hockey than he ever has. However, that's all carrying signs of exhaustion now.
Since March 1, Ersson has played in 14 more games, including Saturday night's 6-2 loss in Columbus, and has dipped to 4-6-3 with an .859 save percentage during that stretch.
That's hardly all on him, as Tortorella mentioned. But it's been seen in the NHL numerous times before – both for playoff hopefuls and Cup contenders – that good goaltending can erase a lot of mistakes and sometimes even carry a team outright to where they're trying to go.
And the Flyers are scrambling for that right now, among other things, to snap a seven-game winless spiral and to try and make one last leap back into a playoff position with the four games they have left.
Ersson has answered the call in goal already under some highly unique circumstances, and for the Flyers to have their best shot at salvaging an unexpected push into the postseason, they'll need him to find a way one more time.
He's definitely not one to shy away from the moment.
"That's the nice thing about being a goalie," Ersson said after a 3-2 win over the San Jose Sharks back on March 12. "You get to impact the game in a big way. That's what you want. You want to have those moments come at you, and you want to come up with the big save."
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