The Phantoms, depleted by both recalls to the Flyers and injuries of their own, have been working through their most challenging stretch of the season on a collective level, but this weekend also brought the biggest challenge of rookie goaltender Carson Bjarnason’s season, to date — and along with it, a chance for his greatest show of resilience yet, in turn.
Bjarnason gets the hook
Friday saw the Phantoms kicking off their weekend with another matchup against the Checkers on home ice — a team who they’ve largely played tightly so far this season, but who have also still had their number — and the Phantoms were looking to push for a win to begin to close the gap between the two of them in the standings. And for this task, Bjarnason was given the start, but it pretty quickly turned into a bit of a struggle for him, as his game just seemed unsettled, and he showed some off timing, some struggles to pick up the shots coming at him, on the way to goals allowed on three of the first four shots he faced.
All told, his night against the Checkers lasted just 11 minutes and 50 seconds, before a change was made and an early chance to regroup was dispensed. And just like that, Bjarnason had been pulled for the first time in his professional career.
The move to pull Bjarnason was not wholly about his play, as the team in front of him certainly also needed a bit of a jolt to get going in that one, but it did remain a proactive move as far as the goaltending was concerned. That is, it became very quickly clear that this was a game in which Bjarnason simply did not have his best stuff, and pulling the chute early allowed them to save him for the next night, in an important game as they tried to stave off the Bears’ attempts to jump over them in the standings.
A decisive response
It would be a significant ask for Bjarnason to hit the reset button so quickly, for such a key matchup, and it was indeed impressive that, as soon as the puck was dropped on Saturday, he seemed to bear no lingering effects of the pulling from the night before.
“I give credit to… [Bjarnason],” head coach John Snowden said after Saturday’s game, “bouncing back from the night that he had last night in a tough situation, first time that it’s happened in the pro game, but he bounces back and he was outstanding tonight.”
Bjarnason’s play wasn’t wholly perfect — he still gave up three goals on the night, though unlike those the night before, these weren’t completely pinnable on him — but it was worlds better than what the team saw from him the night before. This time around, he was able to stabilize, remain more economic in his movements, and better battle through traffic to locate the shots the Bears were putting on him. He got a decent effort in front of him by his defenders, but there was a good handful of really challenging saves that he needed to come up with to keep them in it, and by and large, come up with them, he did.
It was a high level of impact, to be sure, and the meaningfulness of that bounce back, of the timely saves he was able to make, wasn’t lost on the team assembled in front of him, nor on the staff behind the bench.
“I think the turning point, for me,” Snowden went on, “was [Bjarnason’s] save that he makes in the second there, he makes a big save, in a big moment, and we turn it and we go right back down the rink and we score, and stack a couple of shifts after that.”
It was certainly a positive for the team, broadly, as Bjarnason’s improved play in that game was truly instrumental in them picking up the win — which they so sorely needed — but it was a positive too to see the Bjarnason was able to respond to quickly and easily to the lowest point of his season, to learn something from how things unfolded for him and flush any bits that would needlessly weigh him down, and step up for his team when they needed him the most.
“I think it just shows that he took the situation that happened last night,” Snowden concluded, “he didn’t pout about it, he didn’t whine about it, we went out on the ice this morning, got his workout, and he did the right things to prepare himself to play today, and he went out there and played an excellent game. He made some big saves when we needed him to make big saves, especially early in the game when we’re chasing a little bit. And then as the game went on, in overtime, he has a couple big saves off there, in the third period he has a couple big saves. He just was in the right spot. He was on top of the crease. He looked confident. When he was catching pucks, he was catching pucks and they weren’t going anywhere. When pucks were hitting him, he was swallowing them up. So, I mean, once you feel that as a team, that our goalie’s dialed right now, it makes you feel a little bit better, where you say, okay, if I make a mistake, he might have my back right now, he’s gonna have my back right now. And he did.”
At the end of the day, Bjarnason is working through the normal ups and downs that come over the course of a long season, and come particularly along with making his way through his first season in the pros. While Bjarnason has been playing well on the whole, and has delivered a handful of really stellar starts so far this season, there’s a lot left for him to polish out, and there’s still a ways to go before he’s ready to handle the workload of being the number one starter in this league, which is all to be expected.
The good news is that reinforcements are coming at last, as Aleksei Kolosov was returned to the Phantoms this week, so Bjarnason will again have the benefit of sharing the workload of games more evenly, and getting more time to tinker with his game, away from a situation in which all of the weight of getting the season back on track is on his shoulders.
