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Aleksei Kolosov held his own in NHL debut

© Eric Hartline-Imagn Images

The strange saga which has been Aleksei Kolosov’s beginning to the season has gotten another wrinkle. Capping off a short training camp holdout, an expression of displeasure about being assigned to the AHL, and then an assignment to the AHL in the end, Kolosov was recalled to the Flyers after four games with the Phantoms in order to help them shore up their backup goaltending situation, to give them a different look, and finally made his NHL debut last night against the Canadiens.

If the timing of this seemed a little strange, given the numbers Kolosov has been putting up in the AHL, that would feeling would be rightful. Kolosov hadn’t exactly been lighting the world on fire down with the Phantoms, and we saw him putting up a save percentage of just .875 and a goals against average of 3.29. But the numbers aren’t the whole story here. While Kolosov has certainly shown some greenness, made some poor reads and flatly ugly mistakes when trying to play the puck, the numbers also don’t capture the volume of his danger chances the defense has left him trying to battle through. It’s not been a smooth start to the season for the skaters and their defensive structure, and it’s made the adjustment to the league much more difficult for him.

The good news across all of this, perhaps, is that while the numbers still didn’t bear out great for him — four goals against and an. 867 SV% — Kolosov’s last game with the Phantoms was perhaps the best he’s looked with the team. He wasn’t perfect, to be sure, but he looked more like he was reading the play effectively — rather than just being reactive to shots as they’re coming at him — and his quickness looked effective, rather than scrambley, and he was doing better to reset and recover for second and third attempts.

And his NHL debut, in many ways felt like a true extension of his play in the AHL. We might have expected a small step back as he adjusted to the increased pace of play in the NHL, but his more or less the same type as what we saw in that last AHL game up in Hartford. In his debut, Kolosov managed to save 20 of the 24 shots he faced for an .833 SV%, and while those numbers again weren’t overly kind to him, the eye test graded out more favorably. Here too, we saw Kolosov reading play pretty well, even with a good bit of traffic left in front of him, and handling the more or less routine saves on rush chances well.

Kolosov also saw a translation of the sort of “yeah, nothing he could do there” element from AHL to NHL as well, as the Flyers defense showed some shakiness in this one, and as Kolosov found himself burned on a couple of tough deflections. But overall, his play was strong, and he limited his “bad goals” to one (the Caufield goal, which just flat out beat him), and managed to come up with a handful of big, even flashy, saves to bail out the skaters in front of him. A tidy bit of work, all in all.

Now, we’re being careful not to make too much of one game — and a weird one, at that — but Kolosov, with still limited playing experience in North America and coming in to a strange situation with the Flyers and with skaters in front of him trying to battle through second game of a back-to-back fatigue, showed just about as well as we might have hoped to see him do. The schedule is lightening up for the Flyers a bit here, and it remains to be seen when the backup goaltender will be next called upon, but if nothing else, Kolosov has set a solid foundation for himself, and performed well enough to not only earn a second look, but to leave us with some legitimate confidence that he’ll be able to build in this next opportunity, whenever it arrives.

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