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BSH prospect report: Finding our legs

Another week, another prospect report. This week’s report leans a bit Phantoms heavy as well, and with the concentration of prospects hanging out in the AHL at the moment, we suspect that’s just something we’re going to have to get used to this time around. So it goes!

It was a pretty quiet week, all in all, but we did have a bit of a scare over the weekend—Cam York left Sunday’s game with a lower body injury after getting tangled up in the corner along the boards.

Official word is that he’s more or less fine, he’s just listed as day to day at the moment, so we seem to have dodged a bullet (or an organizational injury curse) there.

Three stars

Tyson Foerster

Back on the prospect report for the second week in a row, it’s Tyson Foerster!

We talked last week about how he’s starting to find his legs again at the AHL level after his time away, and he carried that momentum well into this weekend. It wasn’t exactly a massive offensive outpouring that we saw from the Phantoms this week (they totaled just five goals over their last three games, and two of those were single goal affairs), but we still saw him chipping in nicely to what the team was able to put together. All told, Foerster put up a goal and an assist in his three games played, along with a nice total of eight shots on goal. The team’s been a bit up and down through these early goings, but Foerster has been a real bright spot. He’s a fun prospect, plain and simple, and he’s only getting even more fun to watch as he continues to pick up steam.

Cam York

Second star of the week is Cam York for not letting whatever curse is plaguing the Flyers’ whole organization sink its talons into him and fell him long-term.

*knocking furiously on wood*

Jokes aside, York’s been playing well on the whole, to star the season, and he chipped in a goal on a weekend when the team struggled a bit offensively. And, more broadly, he’s doing well with what he can, with a difficult situation. We know that York is a highly skilled player, and he does better when he has players who can think the game as quickly as he can and execute on the plays that he’s trying to set up, and that means that he’s likely going to pop more (on the whole) at the NHL level than at the AHL level, and that puts him in a bit of a bind, as the organization wants to see him impressing in the AHL before he gets called back up with the Flyers. There’s more that he can tap into, still, but he’s finding his footing again down in the AHL, and we’ll see how things trend once he’s able to get back to action.

Samuel Ersson

That grading on a curve thing is coming back into play here for a moment, but just go with it.

Ersson started in two of the Phantoms’ three games of the week, and did a fine enough job therein. All told, he stopped 30 of the 34 shots he faced in his first game, and 32 of 35 in his second, good for an .899 save percentage.

Now, we know this isn’t an absolutely world beating set of numbers to take out of the weekend, but right now the mode we’re in is sort of just “we need to see Ersson just survive getting back into a regular workload” after all the time he missed, and this certainly qualifies. We know that there’s more upside to his game, another level that he’s able to tap into, and we’re still waiting on that to happen, but the first box he needs to check is physically holding up, and so far so good on that one. It’s all a work in progress, but the foundation we’re seeing him set so far is solid.

Honorable mentions

Hunter McDonald

As we said, the Flyers have a whole lot of prospects playing in the AHL this year, but they also have a pretty healthy group playing in the NCAA, despite the number of graduations they had at the end of last season. This includes, of course, last year’s sixth round pick in McDonald, who’s starting to settle in nicely at the college level up at Northeastern.

He picked up his first point back in early October and then had to wait until last weekend’s win over Vermont to tack anything further onto that total—two assists, in this case. It’s a big adjustment, moving from defending in the USHL to doing it in one of the most difficult conferences in college hockey. He’s going to need some time to polish out and develop his game, to be sure, but things are looking pretty good for him so far.

Adam Ginning

And we’ll stick with the defense theme for a moment longer as we close things out. We don’t typically think of Ginning as being a massive offensive contributor—that just hasn’t been his game, really—but he did pick up his first professional point in North America over the weekend (an assist on Forester’s goal), and that was nice to see. He plays a pretty quiet game, on the whole, but it isn’t lost on us that he’s been, well, quietly pretty solid in his first stretch of games with the Phantoms. We’ve made a lot so far of the contributions of some of the flashier defensemen like Cam York and Ronnie Attard, but Ginning shouldn’t get wholly lost in the shuffle. He’s settling in nicely too!

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