While this season’s Phantoms team is going to be pretty well stocked with more veteran players to offer the necessary support to keep things rolling through a long and arduous season, this is still set to be quite a young roster that they’re icing this time around. With new — and some quite high profile — faces stepping in up and down the lineup, this will be a team with some intrigue, but there are few individual pieces with more to prove than forward Alex Ciernik, as he jumps into the North American game, and looks to find his again.
How did his 2025-26 season go?
After injuries derailed a good portion of his Draft+1 season, Ciernik has been working hard to get his development back on track. It’s been two much healthier seasons for him since then, but things have still been somewhat stilted elsewhere.
Last fall, Ciernik was set to graduate up a level abroad, moving from the Swedish Allsvenskan to the Finnish top league in Liiga, a move which showed a nice dedication to continuing to challenge himself, but that challenge proved to still be a significant one. Ciernik spent about half of his season with Pelicans (19 games) and struggled to find his footing, so much so that the decision was made that it would be best for him to be loaned back to the Allsvenskan for the second half of the season.
And while he was able to show a bit more pop in his new setting, the production was still slow to come together for him. In 21 games, he only managed to put up a pair of goals and five points in total. It’s been a slow rebuilding of his game, to be sure, but the Flyers clearly seem to hope that, by signing him and moving him over to North America and getting him under the direct guidance of their AHL and development staffs, that he can get things moving in the right direction more distinctly again.
Ciernik will, though, be coming in for this season with a little bit of experience in the back pocket — he got in for three games on an amateur tryout at the end of the 2024-25 season, and was with the team in the playoffs, so he’s seen a bit of how things are done at the North American pro level. All the same, though, his usage in those games was so limited that it was a bit difficult to take much away from his performances, so he’s coming in with close to a clean slate.
What are we hoping to see from him this season?
The broadest hope for Ciernik is that we see him making some positive strides towards settling into the North American game. Certainly, the adjustment is a big one for any player coming over from Europe — and could well be a particularly steep learning curve for a player like Ciernik, who has bounced around as much as he has — and we’re coming into this season with a great deal of patience offered for him, as he works through these expected learning curves. All the same, we’ll need to see him taking in some key lessons and making appropriate changes to his game.
The biggest and most precise hope for him, though, relates to how he uses his most dynamic element in his speed. On the one hand, there is a real reason to hope that more of his offensive game can be unlocked in this move to North America and its smaller ice, but to see that capability unlocked to its fullest potential, it’s going to take a good deal of playing smarter to go along with this situational change. There’s a lesson to be learned here from a player like Alexis Gendron — who was traded out to the Bruins organization for a change of scenery at last year’s trade deadline — who figured in as a player who also brought a unique (and elsewhere lacking) element with his game breaking speed, and though he was able to create a decent volume of scoring plays off of that, he struggled to elevate the rest of his game to turn himself into a more rounded and consistent contributor.
Ciernik is in a similar position, as his speed would offer a nice boost and different wrinkle to a line, but it’s not enough to just be the first player breaking into the offensive zone, you have to know what to do with the puck when you get there, and just as critically, you have to learn how to effectively build plays up off of your linemates in cycle settings. He still has quite a bit of runway ahead of him, and we’re not expecting him to figure all of that out overnight, but with how crowded their lineup is and looks like it will continue to be, the Phantoms just do not have space for specialists, and Ciernik will need to make strides towards avoiding becoming that if he wants to stick around.
What kind of role do we expect him to play?
All of this, too, will feed into determining exactly what type of role he’ll play with the Phantoms. As we’ve already acknowledged, the Phantoms are rolling into this season with a very full forward corps, and as one of the lesser experienced players in this mix, he’ll especially be in a position of needing to fight for the games and minutes he’s given. The Phantoms coaching staff — dealing with similar logjams through much of last season — have shown a real commitment to fairness and making sure that all players get a fair share of reps to stay fresh, but fair doesn’t necessarily mean even, and if Ciernik struggles with consistency, he could find himself on the outside looking in more often than not.
All the same, he’ll still all but certainly be given some leeway to figure it all out at this level, will be tried out at different spots in the lineup to see what works, but much of his fate will be in his own hands, at the end of the day.
