The injury bug has gotten rolling through the Flyers organization, and some clarity was shed on the statuses of a few injured players down in the AHL with the Phantoms.
The big news is that, per Phantoms communications, Cal Petersen sustained a lower body injury in last Wednesday’s game — in which he was run over twice in his crease — and is expected to miss 6-8 weeks while he recovers. That would put his return somewhere around the beginning of March, if all goes smoothly in that recovery. And that’s another significant hit taken to their goaltending depth — we recall, Eetu Makiniemi also took a lower-body injury in November and isn’t expected back until, at the earliest, the end of next month. The Phantoms rolled with a tandem of Parker Gahagen and Keith Petruzzelli over the weekend — and to reasonably strong results — but one wonders if this opens up an opportunity, indeed a need, to assign Aleksei Kolosov to the farm team to offer them a bit more support. Time will tell.
Elsewhere in the lineup, the Phantoms have been without Emil Andrae for about a week and a half, as he’s been out of the lineup since January 12’s game up in Bridgeport, but, as Flyers GM Daniel Briere confirmed in his media availability this morning, the hope is that Andrae will be back in the lineup for them as soon as this weekend. It’s good news across the board that his injury isn’t serious, and he won’t be out long term, but particularly because the Phantoms do have a long-term injury on the back end that they’ll have to work around — Ben Gleason’s also expected to miss around 6-8 weeks, leaving a big absence for some of the younger players to step up to fill.
And, to wrap it up, there’s a non-update in here as well. That is, Massimo Rizzo, who left Friday’s game after a big collision with teammate Anthony Richard, also missed Saturday’s game to wrap up the weekend. The hope is that whatever kept him out of that one isn’t major — especially considering their thinness at the center position with Rodrigo Abols recalled to the Flyers — but there’s no official update on his status as of yet. We’ll see where things stand when warmups roll around in their next game on Friday.
