PITTSBURGH — So much for the Philadelphia Flyers being too inexperienced for all this. Too young for that matter.Whatever concerns Philadelphia might have had about its young core evaporated over 60 minutes of confident, assured hockey in a 3-2 victory over Pittsburgh in Game 1 of their first-round series on Saturday night.Jamie Drysdale, just 24 and one of 10 Flyers players making his postseason debut, spent part of the first period mixing it up with Penguins captain Sidney Crosby, then gave the Flyers the lead midway through the second with a shot that found its way through a perfectly set screen by 20-year-old Denver Barkey.Porter Martone, 19, provided the game winner late in the third with a wrist shot from the right circle, capping a dazzling sequence in which he hit the brakes and spun around to create a shooting lane in front of Pittsburgh’s Noel Acciari.“I kind of stopped up and shot it and luckily it went in,” Martone said in typically understated fashion.Despite playing in just the 10th game of his NHL career, Martone could sense the vibe shift from the regular season to the playoffs. The sea of yellow towel-waving Penguin fans that greeted the Flyers with boos when they came out for pregame warmups offered tangible proof. So did the intensity of the opening period, when the curiosity of the cross-state rivals’ first postseason meeting in eight years quickly gave way to animosity.Philadelphia stood its ground, often dictating the terms against the Penguins, who have undergone a retooling of their own but still go as the core of Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Kris Letang and Erik Karlsson — who came in with a combined 573 career playoff games — go.While Malkin had a goal and an assist, Crosby was unusually quiet, and Letang and Karlsson were part of a Pittsburgh defense that appeared caught off guard by Philadelphia’s speed.“The execution wasn’t really what we were hoping for,” Karlsson said. “We didn’t really set out to do what we needed to do on our game plan. We turned too many pucks over in the wrong spot. We made it hard on ourselves.”Karlsson is confident that first-year coach Dan Muse and the rest of the Penguins coaching staff will have more answer …
