As they move into their final month of the regular season, the Phantoms appear to be making some changes to their lineup.
The team announced this morning that rookie goaltender Carson Bjarnason has been loaned down to Reading of the ECHL, and Yaniv Perets has been recalled to replace him. Perets has played three games with the Phantoms this season as an injury call-up, and performed reasonably well — his .873 save percentage over those three games isn’t world-beating, but the eye would tell us that he looked steady enough in those showings, under somewhat difficult conditions.
And this is a move that, on its face, seems a bit of a shock — after all, it isn’t terribly often that prospects regarded so highly as Bjarnason see themselves demoted to the ECHL — but there’s some logic that we can work out from this one, and a scenario in which this could still really benefit him in the long run.
What this means for Bjarnason
It’s no secret that Bjarnason has been struggling a bit through this second half of the season. His game hit a real peak in December, as he registered a .921 save percentage over the five games he played on the month, but as his workload ramped up in January when Aleksei Kolosov was on recall to the Flyers, things began to drop off on him.
Since the calendar turned, Bjarnason has played 17 games, he’s been pulled in two of them, and has averaged an .848 save percentage. And what’s been particularly concerning about this is not that his stats have been tanked by a couple of particularly poor games, but rather that the sub-optimal showings have begun to turn into a trend — he’s allowed three or more goals in his last 15 games, and four or more in nine of them, and he’s posted a single game save percentage of .900 in just four of those last 17 games. It’s something of a stark contrast from how things were unfolding for him earlier in the season, when he still had some poor games scattered throughout, but he always seemed to manage to respond in a big way and get back on track quickly. Now, the middling showings are stacking up, and at times outright spiraling.
And some of those struggles could certainly be explained by fatigue setting in, but now that Kolosov’s back and Bjarnason’s usage has been managed a bit more, it stands out that the same struggles are persisting. The both of them have had a difficult task to deal with in a number of games, as the defense has been porous at best at times, but it still remains that, with all of that context taken into account, Bjarnason’s form has been a little more lacking, his tracking a little less sharp, and he’s struggling to come up with those much-needed timely saves to the same degree that he was earlier in the season. Somewhere along the way, his game’s gotten away from him, and it’s been an uphill battle to get it back.
There’s been some writing on the wall recently to suggest that the plan is shifting, and the team is looking to put their traditional rotation by the wayside in a push to collect more wins — it felt notable that they departed from their pattern of starts in last weekend’s three-in-three, starting Kolosov in back-to-back nights for the first time all season, giving him the start in the two games that were more must-win (against teams they’re fighting with in the standings) and leaving Bjarnason to do what he would do in the final game of the weekend against the Penguins — and this move feels like the next natural step in the management of a goalie who’s lost a bit of dependability.
These types of struggles are still within the range of normal for a young goaltender like Bjarnason, but the situation unfolding around him makes things more complicated. That is, there’s a good possibility that he’ll be able to find his game again and regain his form if he’s given more consistent reps to work with in games, not just practices, but the Phantoms are in a race for a playoff spot that couldn’t possibly be any tighter, and they just don’t have the runway to potentially sacrifice wins while he figures it out. This certainly isn’t the ship sailing for Bjarnason, but playoff experience is valuable for the whole team, and that’s where the premium is being placed at the moment, and they’re throwing everything they can at getting there.
The Yegor Zavragin of it all
Of course, the question simmering beneath all of this is whether, with the Phantoms opening up a spot in their lineup, whether the arrival of another exciting prospect in Zavragin is on the horizon. It’s certainly a fair question, especially as one might imagine that, given the challenging season he’s had over in Russia (just from how much he’s been subject to forces beyond his control and bounced around between levels) whether the Flyers would be eager to get him over to North America and under more direct organizational control.
That very well might be a concern, but with Zavragin still having the MHL playoffs to compete in over there, it doesn’t appear that his arrival to the States is overly imminent. They have the wiggle room to make it happen, if the timing works out for everyone, but it seems that this shuffling of the AHL goaltending tandem is less about clearing space for the shiny new toy to be rushed over, and more about finding an effective balance between putting together a winning roster while still doing right by their existing pieces’ development.
