Adam Ginning finds his role in third Phantoms season

Adam Ginning wrapped up his third season with the Phantoms this spring, and as he continues to provide a stabilizing presence on a back end that only seems to keep getting younger, has found himself settling into something of an elder statesman role on this team. It was a challenging season for the Phantoms\' defenders on the whole, as a not always well defined looking system left them too often scrambling in their own end, but Ginning\'s game continued to rise as a mature one, offering a positive bit of balance to a still-maturing defense core.

Games played Goals Assists Points PIM Shots on goal Shooting percentage 69 2 15 17 71 91 2.2

Diving first into the counting stats, there isn\'t much to speak of going on here. And this shouldn\'t come as much of a surprise -- scoring isn\'t exactly a hallmark of Ginning\'s game, but he was still able to chip in a reasonably fair amount in the way of assists, and his shooting percentage is just about the same as it was in the season before, so his shooting efficiency has more or less plateaued. He struggled pretty notably to stay out of the box (though he did take 11 fewer penalty minutes in 11 more games played this season), finishing the season as the team\'s fourth most penalized player.

Games Tracked Corsi-For % Scoring Chances-For % High Danger Chances-For % Primary Shot Assists Secondary Shot Assists 19 48.60 46.57 48.45 7 3

The underlying impacts, though, are less than stellar, as in each of the differentials measuring the share of overall shot attempts taken while he was on the ice, as well as more dangerous scoring chances, he fell both below breakeven as well as around nine percent below the team\'s average in each of these areas.

Now, maybe this was, in part, a product of the difficulty of the matchups he was tasked with handling. Ginning was pretty routinely sent out for defensive zone starts against their opponents\' top lines, lines that one might reasonably expect would be able to threaten offensively to a greater degree. Going forward, one would hope that he could take a step forward and take a bit more active of a role in suppressing shots against in his matchups, but there remains the fact that those shots against weren\'t converted to goals against at a hugely high rate (he finished the season at a -2), so maybe there\'s something that was being done yet to keep him afloat in his minutes.

Three Questions

Did he live up to expectations?

Ginning\'s time with the Phantoms through his first two seasons has been largely solid, if also largely unflashy, across the board. He brought with him from the start a pretty mature game, and while he doesn\'t bring the same amount of offense that others in the defense group do -- and didn\'t see the same boost in his numbers as someone like Helge Grans or Ethan Samson from the team\'s doubling down on shooting from the points -- but his defensive game has remained reliably sound and consistent across his whole stint with the team so far. While there might be some disappointment from some viewers that the offense hasn\'t improved markedly season over season, his defensive steadiness on a team that has increasingly struggled in this area has been valuable (when it was all said and done, as we said, he finished this season with that -2 in the goals scoring differential, which still leaves room for improvement, but which also still reasonably well outpaced the team\'s collective -6 on the season). He\'s settled nicely into a role for the team where he\'s not usually all that noticeable, but this means that he\'s doing his job to keep his details locked down -- providing a bit of physical presence in front of the net, keeping good body position to break up rush chances, blocking shots, and using that active stick to disrupt cycle plays.

What would we like to see him improve on next season?

As far as the broad strokes of his game go, at this point in his career, Ginning kind of is what he is. He came over to North American having already gotten well established in his professional career in Sweden, and now that he\'s wrapped up three seasons in the AHL, he\'s pretty well a finished project He\'s carved out a role for himself at the AHL level as a player who can take a lot of difficult minutes -- both at even strength as well as on the penalty kill -- and while not without some mistakes made along the way, can take those minutes without things blowing up on him in a really catastrophic way.

There\'s some small tinkering that can be done -- getting a little more aggressive in getting after the puck carrier deep in the defensive zone, for example -- to continue to tighten his game up, but there aren\'t any major holes in his game that need shoring up at this point. There\'s a hope as well that, as the Phantoms retool their defensive zone structure heading into this season, that there can be something of a rising tide lifts all boats effect, and Ginning\'s impacts along with the rest of the group\'s will improve in turn.

What can we expect from him next season?

With three seasons of North American professional hockey under his belt (and parts of five SHL seasons banked before that as well) Ginning has officially moved into the space of veteran contributor at this level. His on-ice role will likely stay the same -- with a high volume of defensive zone starts and top penalty kill deployment -- and he will also all but certainly be asked to take on something of a leadership role on the team. The next phase of his game might not have so much to do with reaching a lofty next stage in his development, but rather with taking on a mentor role for other members of this increasingly young defense core. It\'s easy to envision him spending at least parts of the season playing alongside someone like Oliver Bonk, who will be working through that steep jump up to the AHL from a London team where he was likely a little bit insulated by such a dominant program on the whole. If Ginning can continue to hold up well under his difficult defensive assignments, that\'s certainly a plus, but his ability to help out a young team -- as well as a new and relatively inexperienced at this level coaching staff -- would go a long way.

Talking Points