When Travis Konecny was asked about Brian Elliott in their postgame interview Tuesday night, the goalie jokingly patted his teammate on the back as if to say: Go ahead, talk me up, T.K.
Konecny had no problem obliging.
"Oh yeah," Konecny said.
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The Flyers know what they have in their backup goalie — and it's highly valued by management, coaches and Elliott's teammates.
Elliott gives the Flyers someone they can trust, someone they can call on regardless of the circumstances.
The circumstances weren't pretty heading into Tuesday night. The Flyers had just yielded six goals to the Sabres the night prior in what was their worst home loss in the Alain Vigneault era. With a back-to-back situation against Buffalo, it was Elliott's turn in net for Game 2 of the set.
With the lengthy pause to the 2019-20 season and the pushed-back start to the 2020-21 campaign, Elliott had started only two games in a span of 10 and a half months before making his first start of this season Tuesday night. Those two outings came in August during the return-to-play 24-team tournament.
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Considering the circumstances, how did the 35-year-old veteran look against the Sabres? He put up a 40-save shutout the night after his team surrendered more goals than it had in any home game last season.
"He was battling out there, working his butt off," Claude Giroux said after the Flyers' 3-0 win. "He was probably the reason we won the game tonight."
Elliott has five shutouts in a Flyers jersey and 41 in his career — more than guys like Braden Holtby (35), Sergei Bobrovsky (34), Devan Dubnyk (32) and Corey Crawford (26). Elliott has been a big influence on 22-year-old Carter Hart and impressively spelled the young goalie during two critical junctures last regular season.
Going back to mid-January of last year, Elliott is 8-2-1 with a 2.20 goals-against average, .918 save percentage and three shutouts in his past 12 games.
"We know what we're going to get," Konecny said Tuesday night while sitting next to Elliott. "That’s the benefit of having two solid goalies. We knew that the effort yesterday wasn’t there for the team. We know that Moose competes when he’s in there and he was going to give us the best chance — he did exactly what we thought and it kept us in the game. It’s good to see that because obviously Moose has had a lot of games under his belt, he's got a lot of experience. We need those big games out of him and he’s there to do it for us."
The call-me-whenever Elliott will once again be crucial to the Flyers, especially with a shortened, more compact schedule.
And Konecny won't mind talkin' him up some more.
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