Phantoms faltered under weight of expectations

The Phantoms\' season ended with something of a fizzle, and in quite similar fashion as last year\'s did -- after sweeping the Penguins in the play-in round, they were defeated by the Bears in the Division Semifinal, just this year it happened in five games instead of four. Maybe you can call this incremental progress. Perhaps it is. But, more than anything else, this exit feels early, stings a bit more. Because this year was supposed to be different.

This was a difficult season for the Phantoms, there\'s no way around that. They began the season with just two wins in the month of October, they twice this year lost five in a row, and never managed to win more than three games in a row across the whole of the season. They showed some real flashes of brilliance, to be sure, but there was this lingering feeling of them continually approaching some inflection point, but never being quite able to cross it.

The playoffs, though, offered them a perfect opportunity to do this. The Phantoms had spent much of the regular season working towards building a consistent identity, one which is hardworking and details-focused.

\"I\'m a big believer in that\'s how you win,\" said Phantoms head coach Ian Laperriere back in March after their win over Milwaukee. \"Teams that are on the go, and they fly, it\'s cute in November, October, but when it counts, the team that wins, at this level and the next level, are the teams that check well. And if you add skilled players to that, and you have your skilled players believing in checking, that\'s the right recipe.\" And it\'s a recipe that made sense for them, particularly considering the group of players that they had to work with at the time -- one with some skill, sure, but short the game breakers needed to push their roster to the next level.

But, by the end of the season, the game breakers had arrived -- between the boost brought by new additions Nikita Grebenkin, Jett Luchanko, and Alex Bump, and the return of more experienced players like Olle Lycksell, Rodrigo Abols, and Emil Andrae from the Flyers, suddenly the Phantoms looked to be carrying their deepest and most skilled lineup into the postseason since 2018, when they made it to the Conference Final. In many ways, it felt like things were all coming together, as the team that had laid a foundation of ability to outwork their opponents now had the personnel available to out-skill them as well.

This worked well for them through their pair of wins over the Penguins, the mixture of their skill and the commitment to their checking game, but, just as they had all season, bad habits and poor execution began to catch up to them by the time the series turned. They struggled to make space for themselves and fell back on lazy plays with the puck. After a good burst of scoring in the series against the Penguins, the scoring dried up to a rate of just 2.6 goals per game (notably below their regular season rate of 2.99 goals per game). The seventh-worst power play in the regular season converted at a rate of just 10.3 percent in the postseason. The team who was the fifth most penalized through the regular season was called for 151 penalty minutes in seven playoff games. In sum, if it was a disciplined and focused model of play that they were working towards building in the regular season, they lost sight of it when the playoffs rolled around.

\"I think we fought hard but I think we [forgot] how to play in the first two periods,\" said Anthony Richard after their Game 5 loss. \"I think we got nervous a little bit, playing on our heels, couldn\'t get our forecheck going. So they did a good job of just playing North and simple, and that killed our momentum.\" That feeling of abandoning their game became a common one throughout that second series in particular. There\'s something to be said for how close, by and large, the Phantoms were able to keep things even in the losses, but perhaps that compounds the frustration in the end -- how different could these games have been if they showed up for the whole of them?

All in all, the outcome of this brief playoff run shouldn\'t erase all of the positive work that the Phantoms players put in this season, particularly on the developmental side, but it does remain something of the final datapoint to color the evaluation of the team\'s process. The stacked lineup certainly looked like it gave them the best chance at making a legitimate run through these Calder Cup playoffs, but it couldn\'t save them from their inability to make the tough lessons stick when it mattered most. Maybe that\'s a failure of the process. After all, if a full season is spent laying the groundwork for a style which is playoff hockey, is winning hockey, and all it gets you is one more win than the year before, how successful is it, how solid is that foundation?

It\'s a tough way to end the season, there\'s no way around this either, and it sets up a tough set of questions for the powers that be -- is that incremental progress enough for them, and is this a trajectory they want to remain on as they stare down the addition of even more high-end prospects to the team\'s mix, come the fall?

Talking Points