With a number of prospects already on their holiday breaks, and still more slowing down in advance of them (or rather, gearing up for the upcoming international play), it’s been a quieter week around here, but there are still a handful of standout performances to highlight. Let’s get into it.
The News of the Week
This week saw a bit more shuffling taking place on the Phantoms’ back end, as they lost Helge Grans to injury ahead of last weekend’s games in upstate New York (he’s missed the last three at this point), but they got another body back to replace him, as Ty Murchison was sent down after his stint up with the Flyers earlier this week.
Also, in prospect adjacent news, Egor Zamula cleared waivers and is available to be assigned to the Phantoms. The Flyers haven’t yet pulled the trigger on that move, but if it happens, it’s one that will have some pretty major implications for the Phantoms, who are already dealing with a bit of a logjam at the defense position.
Three Stars
Jack Nesbitt
As he missed out on an invitation to Hockey Canada’s World Junior camp this time around, Nesbitt is still kicking around with his junior team in Windsor, and if there was any disappointment hitting him for not getting that invitation, he certainly hasn’t let that slow him down. Nesbitt has a cool four points over his last four games, including a goal and an assist (along with a whopping seven shots on goal) in his last game, a big win for Windsor over the Greyhounds.
Nesbitt’s chances of making the World Junior squad next year will be better — as an older and more developed player — but in the meantime, it’s been a real positive to see him continuing to make the most of his situation, and step up for his team while they have him.
Nathan Quinn
Quinn, too, is continuing to make a nice bit of noise at the CHL level. The Remparts are beginning to find a bit more consistent success as their season wears on, and Quinn has been a major driving force in that — he has five goals and seven points over his last four games, which brings him up to 33 points over the first 29 games on the season, a figure which leads his team by a pretty comfortable margin (the next player behind him trails by nine points). He’s finding some nice consistency as well, and this is exactly the type of output and level of engagement from a player as he continues to approach his graduation to the college level.
Carson Bjarnason
Bjarnason is still getting somewhat sparing usage so far for the Phantoms — it’s working out that if it’s two games on the week, he’ll split with Kolosov, but if there are three, he’ll get just one start — but he’s been getting his game trending up really nicely in the work he is getting. He started last week for the Phantoms in their road trip finale in Rochester, and stopped 25 of 26 shots (including standing on his head through eight rounds of the shootout) on his way to securing the lone win of the week for his team. Things were a little up and down for him, understandably, in his first sampling of professional action, but he’s picking it up pretty remarkably quickly, which is certainly encouraging to see. It’s still early, but if he keeps this up, it will be interesting to see how long it is before he forces, at the very least, a true even split of starts between himself and Kolosov.
Honorable Mentions
Elsewhere in that Phantoms lineup, it’s been pretty quiet on the whole. The Phantoms are really struggling to find scoring up and down the lineup, and the moments when they’ve been able to finally break through have been fewer and farther between. Over these last three games, Jacob Gaucher has put up two goals (he had both of the team’s only goals in the road games on Friday and Saturday), while Alex Bump chipped one in on Wednesday, assisted on by Denver Barkey. On top of that, Tucker Robertson didn’t have any proper points in regulation, but he did score in the shootout on Saturday to secure the Phantoms their lone win of the week.
And on the flip side of the goaltending situation, it was a bit of a tough week for Aleksei Kolosov. He was given the start in two of their three games on the week, and stopped 25 of 27 shots in Syracuse, and the 15 of 17 against Springfield, but came away with losses in both of those games. This, too, makes for losses in his past six starts. And while there’s some team context to take into account here — he hasn’t had a huge margin for error, given the lack of scoring support the skaters have been offering him — but he’s also been struggling some to come up with the really timely saves when they need them the most (which can be a bit nebulous, but which is valuable all the same).
Across the pond, Alex Ciernik is still finding his footing again over in the Allsvenskan. As we might recall, it took him two games to get on the board with Nybro, and then he had points in his next two games, and then he had none in the two after that. However, he was able to stop that streak at two games once again, and picked up a goal in Wednesday’s game to get himself back on track. Will the pattern continue into this next week? We will see.
And finally, camps are getting rolling ahead of this month’s World Juniors, and while we don’t have any meaningful stats to report from those just yet — as they’re all practices and friendly games — we’ll close this out with a small update from the realm of the Canadian team’s practice sessions — as they’ve been working through some different looks and towards whittling down their roster, the coaching staff has bounced Jett Luchanko up and down the lineup, but today they’ve slid him over to the right wing alongside Coles Reschny and Beaudoin. Who knows if this is a look that will stick once the tournament opens next week, but if it does, it will be interesting to see if this helps wake up a bit more of a shooting game for him than we’ve been seeing in his time in the OHL.
