This year was finally the year, gang. After hyping up Philippe Myers for years, for hearing about him as this highly touted prospect and waiting for him to finally be ready to break into the NHL, this season, he finally got his chance. He came in to training camp and started strong but sort of lost some steam, and Andrew MacDonald coming back from injury much, much earlier than anticipated all but pushed him back to the Phantoms to start the season. But after a strong first half of the season, he worked himself into the “first call-up” position, And once he got the call and made his Flyers debut, Myers worked to make it so they couldn’t send him down. He had a solid start to his rookie campaign—let’s dig in.
By The Numbers
Basic Stats
| Games Played | Goals | Assists | Points | PIM | Shots on Goal | Shooting Percentage |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 23 | 4.35 |
The points weren’t really coming for Myers in this first run of games, and this was, if nothing else, a little bit of a disappointment because he’s a player who projects to have some offensive upside, but he just wasn’t able to tap into it. That said, he only played 20 games, and played in a limited role, so it’s understandable that every single thing didn’t click for him immediately. He was creating some chances, so we’re hopeful that he can build on that next season.
5v5 On-Ice Stats
| Score-Adjusted Corsi For% | SA Corsi Relative | Corsi For % RelTM | SA Expected Goals Relative | Goals For % | PDO |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 46.71 | 4.46 | -0.96 | -11.98 | 38.15 | 96.31 |
5v5 Individual Stats
| Points/60 | Primary Points/60 | Shot Attempts/60 | Expected Goals/60 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0.43 | 0.22 | 12.98 | 0.17 |
The underlying numbers, then, are something of a mixed bag. We see that Myers was generating some chances while he was on the ice, and his PDO suggests that he was also getting a bit unlucky in his on-ice results, but there’s still something to be desired here. Because the Flyers were, generally speaking, getting out-shot and out-chanced while Myers was on the ice, and his numbers relative to his teammates are below where we’d like to see them. It’s not a stellar stat line, by any means, but here is where we have to remind ourselves that we’re only looking at a 20 game sample, the first 20 games for a player that had only just come up from the AHL. Do we want to see better from him? Absolutely. But he’s going to need a bit more time to get there.
Three Burning Questions
Did this player live up to our expectations for this season?
Once he finally made it to the NHl, we can feel pretty comfortable saying yes. Maybe we thought we would have seen him making the jump earlier, but it’s also a numbers game, you know? But once he got to the NHL, he had a pretty immediate impact. He was playing in something of a sheltered role, but all the same, he was able to hit the ground running and prove that he could not just hang at the NHL level, but also flash that same tenacity and potential for offensive upside that we loved seeing from him in the AHL. His skills seemed to be translating, and that’s what we wanted to see.
What do we expect from this player next season?
This is a pretty easy answer, in part, because Chuck Fletcher pretty much told us that he envisions Myers starting the season slotting in on the right side of the third pair, so it seems that that spot is his for the taking. That takes some of the wondering out of things, for us at least.
And with that (presumably) permanent roster spot, we expect to see Myers continuing to work out the kinks in his game, to continue to work to acclimate to the NHL level, and find a greater degree of consistency. From there we’d like to see him move on from just hanging to doing more dominating of average third pair competition, but that’s the next step. We’re not there yet. We expect him to take at the very least a small step forward in his development, but we’ll see where that takes us.
What would we like to see this player improve on?
We alluded to consistency in our last point, and that would be one of the bigger pieces. Because, as with the preseason, he came out with a strong start but didn’t quite maintain that same level across all of his 20 games played. It’s hard to expect a player to be at 100 percent every single night, but we’d like to see a bit more evenness.
The other piece is we’d like to see those underlying numbers improve. It’s worth noting that the team as a whole wasn’t driving play terribly well down the stretch, but as we said above, relative to his teammates, Myers wasn’t exactly flourishing. Are we worried? Not really, it’s still early and he’s still working out his game at the NHL level, but we’d like to see him tighten up some and, for example, help generate a few more and better chances while he’s on the ice, and work to translate to the sound defensive game that we saw at the AHL level. Just keep on building, pal.
All stats via Corsica.Hockey, HockeyDB, and Natural Stat Trick
