eyelash growth

The Flyers coach is running out of options as he prepares his beyond-desperate team for Game 3 tonight.

”Frustrated? Yeah,” he said when asked to gauge his and his team’s mood. ”Irritated? Definitely.”

The man who has pushed all the right buttons for the Flyers during their unlikely postseason run is down 0-2 and running out of buttons to push.

His team has proved amazingly adept at digging itself out of cavernous holes throughout the regular season and the playoffs, but it might lack the heavy equipment necessary for such a major excavation.

How does Laviolette make his next move knowing every time he says ”check” a chorus of Hawks sing out ”checkmate?”

Worse yet, he must know he and his players still haven’t seen the Hawks close to their red-and-black-streaking best. Lost amid the grip of Hawks Fever in Chicago is that this hasn’t been a well-played series. The Flyers played the best hockey of the series during the third period of Game 3. The Hawks have yet to put together a period — let alone a game — where they have played as well as they did during the vast majority of these playoffs.

Laviolette’s latest strategy? Try to crawl inside Hawks goalie Antti Niemi’s head with flashlights and funhouse mirrors.

”We’ve got to put more pressure on their goaltender,” Laviolette said. ”He’s a rookie goaltender playing in the Stanley Cup finals. We have to get on the board here tomorrow night and put a little bit of doubt there.

”Our team is capable of scoring a lot of goals, put a lot of pressure on him. It’s a tough position, goaltending. He’s representing a city that hasn’t won a Cup in [49] years. We have to give him a crack of doubt.”

Laviolette’s options are limited. He can bench goalie Michael Leighton and hope Brian Boucher can do for his team what Niemi did for the Hawks in the final 20 minutes of Game 3, when he turned away scoring chances right and left. Whether to replace his goalie is a tough call and one that only Laviolette can make. Only he and Boucher know how healthy Boucher is after he sprained both knees earlier in the playoffs.

In other words, the city that gave us ”Rocky” is holding casting calls in search of its next great sports hero. The problem is, the way this series is going, it might take more than one.

”The guys in this room. That’s all we can rely on,” Flyers forward Danny Briere said. ”That’s all we’ve been since the beginning of the year. We haven’t had many additions. In the trade deadline, there were no trades. It’s guys in this room that have been doing the job the whole year. It’s not going to change now.”

Laviolette let the Go-Go Hawks go and got beat 6-5 in Game 1. He tried to slow things down and got beat 2-1 in Game 2. His team dominated the Hawks in the third period of Game 2, and Niemi responded by making himself a leading contender for series MVP.

He even tried to get his team to be more physical early in Game 2 by injecting Dan Carcillo into the lineup. A healthy scratch in the Flyers’ last three playoff games, Carcillo has a reputation that makes Adam Burish blush. This is the guy who announced he would be involved in the first fight in a Winter Classic game before the Flyers played the Boston Bruins at Fenway Park on New Year’s Day. Midway through a sleepy first period, he delivered, squaring off with Shawn Thornton before skating to the penalty box, a toothless grin stretching from ear to ear.

Carcillo was effective early in Game 2, even if his biggest hit came on teammate Jeff Carter. The Flyers were more physical than they were while not being whistled for a penalty in Game 1, even if it meant they were giving up scoring with Carcillo replacing Simon Gagne on the top line. The problem was, the Hawks outshot the Flyers 9-3 in the period but also had four more hits.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

”It’s not the time to get discouraged,” Flyers captain Mike Richards said. ”It’s not the time to try to do different things on the ice. If we keep plugging along the way we have been playing, and doing the things we have been doing, the results are going to come.”

The results are coming, all right, even if they’re not the results the Flyers so desperately need.

Do they still have a chance? Yeah? Are they running out of answers? Definitely.

Flyers running out of buttons to push