Speaks to a point I was trying to make in that shitshow Playoffs board thread, but basically I have less concern about this Isles team because the combo of Price and Weber or Petry (particularly Weber) was kryptonite for the Flyers' dump-in/forecheck game. The Islanders have a good defense, but the Flyers shouldn't have nearly the same issues establishing the zone as they did against Montreal. Won't be easy, once again, but Price and Weber killed those efforts without breaking a sweat--Varlamov just doesn't handle the puck that well and good as the individual pieces in NY are, none of them is the solitary machine that is Weber. Flyers should be able to get just a couple more turnovers and, from those, just a few more sustained zone stays over the course of the series than they did against the Habs. If you can convert, a handful of additional turnovers can be the difference in a series.
Watching Weber go head to head with Couturier on those sequences was really something. Couturier's one of the smarter forwards in the league, and he's not a small man--he uses his body quite well to seal off and disrupt defensemen in their own zone, and his brain to snuff out their first move and flag down a puck or two. Against Weber, just nothing he could do. Shea physically way too strong to be hindered even by a guy like Couturier, and it seemed like he'd already read out 2-3 passing options by the time any forward reached him, he always had somewhere to play it safely. You could've sent three deep after every dump-in on Weber and Price and still not sniffed the puck all game.
