It’s been another busy week of action in the books for the Phantoms, and after kicking off their week with a big win on home ice against a high-powered Rochester team (holding the top scoring offense in the league to just two goals), they took their show on the road for a pair of games against Providence and Hartford on the weekend. That weekend back-to-back ended in a split, with a strong response game pulled together against the Wolf Pack after a tough loss to the Bruins on Friday, bringing the Phantoms up to a quite respectable seven wins over their last 10 games, and a continued accumulation of lessons learned as they find themselves placed in new and at time more difficult situations as this season really gets going.
Barkey stays hot
The Phantoms had a nice mix of contributions from players up and down their lineup this week, but again one of their top producers over these last three games was Denver Barkey, who put up two goals and an assist over that span. His offensive game has been clicking very well of late (he’s up to five goals over his last six games), and it seems a fitting reward for an underlying process which has been working just as well.
Much has been made recently about Alex Bump’s climbing of the leaderboard of rookie points scorers, but Barkey at this point isn’t far behind him at all. As it stands, Bump is sitting with 15 points in a tie for fourth in the ranking, while Barkey trails with 13 points in a tie for the sixth position. What’s more, with his two goals on the week, he’s jumped up to seven on the season and into a tie for third among rookies in goals scoring.
Now, maybe the equation is a little different because Barkey is a little younger and coming from juniors and not college, and is not quite as far ahead in his development — and a similarly fevered call for Barkey to be recalled would be premature here as well — but it’s worth giving the work he’s been doing lately the same love. It’s always a big question whether these players who score heaps in juniors, particularly the undersized ones, will be able to replicate that success at the professional level. It’s not an easy task by any stretch of the imagination, but Barkey has come in and quickly found his footing and quickly delivered a resounding assurance that his game indeed is easily translatable. He’s certainly not a finished product here, but he’s built just about as strong of a foundation just about as quickly as one might have hoped in this rookie season.
Penalty kill remains a problem
This was another week which brought with it a good volume of positive takeaways, but the performance of the team’s penalty kill was unfortunately not one of them. It’s been a bit of an uphill battle for the team when down a man — a particular shame because the team has been playing a much more disciplined game than they were in the first couple of weeks of the season — and with four more power plays goals allowed on the week, the Phantoms have seen their penalty kill drop to 75.7 percent on the season, down to fourth worst in the league. And what’s more, they’ve gotten the other side of their special teams equation clicking nicely, as their power play is rolling along at a 21.2 percent conversion rate, which is good for 12th in the league and tops in their division, which makes the differences in the levels of effectiveness of late feel even more stark.
It’s been a noticeable dropoff in effectiveness from the start of the season, and while it’s true that it felt like some level of regression was inevitable, with how often they were getting called for penalties and how often they were able to wriggle out of that trouble, more often recently the group has just looked a little bit more scattered in the defensive zone, a little less hard in their coverage, and they’re getting exploited for it.
Now, there are some factors at work here that might be limiting them — they have some rookie skaters in their penalty killing rotation, and it’s bound to take some time for them to settle into that role, plus the fact that they have a first-year assistant coach running the unit and himself settling into that role — and the hope is that with more time and reps, some of those weaker points will polish out. There’s some room for latitude here, but the clock is ticking. The Phantoms are building up their new system well, and their young team is finding a great deal of success, but it’s smaller areas like this penalty kill weakness which are holding them back from hitting the next level of play and overall success. It’s still a bit early in the season to be overly concerned with the standings, but they do remain tightly packed in the middle, and it won’t be long before the Phantoms will find themselves in a position where every possible point matters, and they won’t be able to afford to keep sacrificing goals on a penalty kill which is lagging behind the rest of their game.
Hanging with the top teams
The Phantoms also faced one of their most challenging matchups of the season to date this weekend, as they headed up to Providence to face the Bruins, who are starting to create some real separation between themselves and the rest of the pack in their division, as far as that points percentage go. The Phantoms have struggled so far in their matchups against the Penguins so far this season — the other team still ahead of them in the standings — and this meeting with the other of these two top teams provided a real test of what the Phantoms have been building, how they match up with the division’s big guns.
And that result was, in total, something of a mixed bag. The Phantoms looked a bit out of sorts in the first period, getting turned around in the neutral zone a bit too often and looking a bit stifled in their generation of chances at even strength. And even though they got a bit of a boost from a power play goal tallied, a couple of breakdowns had them down by a goal at the first intermission.
To their credit, though, they were able to stick with it in this one, even after giving up another goal early in the third period. Their transition game began to wake up more as the game went on, and they were getting better chances as a result. Indeed, they ended up getting the better of the chances across the whole of the game, outshooting the Bruins 32-23, and setting up nicely in front of their net to create a higher volume of dangerous scoring chances (one of which they did convert on late in regulation to pull themselves back within a goal), but the Providence goaltender proved difficult for them to solve, and they fell short in this one in the end.
It can be a little trite to keep harping on moral victories, but if there was ever a valid one, this would be it. This wasn’t their cleanest game, but it was still one that they were able to keep close in. There will likely be some lessons learned in this one about the level of play needed to fully take down a top team like Providence, but it should also be encouraging to see that they aren’t miles off from being able to do so. These two teams won’t see each other again until January, but that rematch will certainly one to tune in for.
