This was going to be the sweet beginning that would mark the end of what had been a long, strange trip of a year for his always interesting, never-quite-winning Philadelphia Flyers. But now that they're tripping all over themselves again, you have to wonder ... how long can he go on like this?

	The Flyers scoring problems only got worse when John LeClair was injured on Nov. 29.

He is Bob Clarke. And make no mistake, he's so confuuuuussssseeeed.

"It's a little bit alarming to me," Clarke, the Flyers' president and general manager, said last weekend amid his team's ongoing skid. "You play so good for the first 10 or 12 games and then it goes dry from everybody. None of our top players are scoring, and I don't know why that happens. We've been getting lots of shots ... (but) we're not putting the puck on the net."

So you can hardly blame him ... for being confused, anyway.

This is a Flyers team that still should be enjoying success in the Eastern Conference, should certainly be scoring faster than the pitiful pace -- a little more than a goal per game -- it put up in November.

But this is also the same, old club that with proven offensive weapons Jeremy Roenick, John LeClair, Mark Recchi and Keith Primeau, blooming star Simon Gagne and rapidly developing Justin Williams figured to do some real damage in the playoffs last season. But they swooned at the start of spring, hit the playoffs flat and virtually imploded into comical chaos in their series with the Ottawa Senators.

"We're doing the same thing we did last year," Clarke said. "We shoot it into the corner, chase it and work it behind the goal line. Nobody shoots the puck at the net. There's lots of hard work, but you don't get anything out of it. We started off being a real good puck control team, passing it good. Now we've lost it ... and I'm not sure why."

They started out looking unbeatable, playing the new system to perfection, winning big and storming to the early lead in the Eastern Conference. A month-long turnaround later, they were preparing for a game Thursday night with their most popular rivals, the New York Rangers, having won just two of their last 12 games (2-5-4-1) and scoring all of 14 goals over that dirty dozen.

So much for the grand plan of dumping the dump-'n'-chase.

The new head coach is trying not to allow his frustration to boil over, but admitted in the wake of a 1-0 overtime loss to the Devils on Monday that he was "really angry."

Darn it.

"As a team we should be angry," said new coach Ken Hitchcock. "We were pushed out in the third period and we didn't squeeze. We played really well. We had a chance to go for the throat in the third period and we weren't able to finish it."

So with all that said and once again left undone, is it so mad to suggest something like this: Maybe the Flyers just aren't good enough. Come on, enough of desperately trying to play the right way again and overcoming injuries and good goalies beating them. This inability to score is nothing new, and guess what -- it's not even the biggest problem the Flyers are encountering.

They're offensively-challenged even when they have more players on the ice than the other guys do. Their power play is already adopting the look of last year -- one of the five worst in the league. What's really worrisome, however, is the penalty kill, formerly a Philadelphia strongpoint. Yet entering that game against the Devils, the Flyers had killed less than 80 percent of the opposition power plays, ranking and reeking 28th of the NHL's 30 teams.

To that end, the prudence policy of summer resulted in Clarke sticking with the same capable but slow-moving defense. Teams with slow feet along the blue line tend to have trouble reversing to retrieve pucks, then wheeling and dealing them quickly out of the defensive zone. Yet in Hitchcock's system, this isn't optimal, it's mandatory.

Since people like Dan McGillis and Eric Desjardins have had some problems doing that, the forwards are spending too much time reversing course in the neutral zone. This has cut into the freewheeling attack the Flyers flashed in peeling out to a 9-1-2 start (scoring 44 goals in those 12 games) before the tides of November crashed early.

	TALE OF TWO SEASONS
	LAST SEASON
		REG. SEASON	PLAY- OFFS
	Goals for:	2.85	.40
	Goals against:	2.34	2.20
	Power play:	13.0	6.2
	Penalty kill:	86.3	83.3
	THIS SEASON
		OCT.	NOV.
	Goals for:	4.00	1.38
	Goals against:	2.10	2.46
	Power play:	19.4	5.9
	Penalty kill:	83.1	74.2

Nine weeks and already fighting for their playoff lives, or just the tale of two seasons?

"What happened at the start of the year is that we were this kind of team and we were scoring," said Hitchcock. "So you feel like you can score, and it's 'We're gonna score all the time.' And when we stopped scoring, we looked for a different way to play.

"We have to be hard to play against. If we're going to create offensive opportunities, that's another step that has to be there. Not easy, not soft, not waiting for odd-man rushes -- we have to dig in."

Instead, they're digging downward in the Eastern Conference standings, as they continue to look offensively clueless. The posterchild for this not-so-new malady is Gagne, the club's leading goal scorer of a season ago (33), who has all of two goals more than a quarter of the way through this season.

Moreover, Gagne was stoned by Martin Brodeur twice on would-be game-winning breakaway goals in the two 1-0 Devils' wins at First Union Center in the past month. Both Brodeur saves were almost immediately followed by winning goals by those other bedeviling guys.

Not the way you like to lose, but not Ottawa in springtime, either.

Using the Devils as a prime example, 1-zilch games between two defensively-oriented (read: boring) teams should tell you everything you need to know about why all of 18,968 excitement seekers showed up to watch that game at First Union Center Monday night.

This has been part of the most recent chapter of The Philadelphia Story -- disinterested fans. Even the game against the Rangers, a twice- or thrice-annual event that almost sells out before the season starts, is affected. Though the Flyers were running promos on their own sports cable network and running ads via local radio, television and newspaper outlets, some 650 seats remained unsold Wednesday afternoon.

Even with a good walkup through the snow Thursday night, the Flyers would only achieve their third sellout of the season. Soaring ticket prices, ridiculously invisible parking options and the overall sagging state of the economy have been listed as valid excuses. But maybe four first-round losses in five years and yet another fast start gone awry are taking the costliest toll.

Oh, and then there's LeClair. In the midst of one of several recently embarrassing losses -- a 7-2 stink bomb laid in Pittsburgh on Thanksgiving Eve -- he was pushed from behind by Penguins defenseman Marc Bergevin, shoved to the ice and ridden into the boards. The result: a torn labrum in the right shoulder that had to be surgically repaired Wednesday.

It'll be almost three months before LeClair hopes to play again. Maybe by then, one of his teammates might think of retaliating against Bergevin. Of course, there are other battles to fight until then.

"You want to fight through (things) and that's why I'm angry," Hitchcock said. "You have to get dirty. You have to get your nose really, really dirty, and you have to be determined."

If all of this coachspeak seems vaguely familiar ... that's because it is. But the new coach with the same old players swears that what is affecting his team now isn't the same plague that killed it in the playoffs.

"No, not one bit," said Hitchcock. "That was dysfunctional. It was just trading chances and you don't want to do that. We want to win a 0-0 game. It's an attitude that does that and we want to have that attitude. It's a learning thing. It takes a long time."

That much is obvious. But that doesn't make it any easier to accept for the people -- both the man upstairs and those still left in the stands.

Rob Parent of the Delaware County (Pa.) Times is a regular contributor to ESPN.com.