It was an AHL.TV free preview weekend that’s just come and gone, meaning that more eyes than usual had the chance to tune in for the Phantoms’ regular season opener on Saturday night. With a team deep with interesting and exciting prospects — some making their debuts in the league, others returning with some experience — the draw to check out this game wasn’t hard to find. But those who tuned in for this one were likely left feeling underwhelmed, to say the least.
This first game was, to put it bluntly, a bit of a disaster class. The energy was lacking, the Phantoms were turning the puck over frequently, were losing their one-on-one battles, they struggled to create clean exits from the defensive zone, finding themselves often hemmed in for extended periods and bleeding chances. Much of the offense they were getting, particularly early in the game, was limited to shots from the perimeter. They broke down often, and while they didn’t get a stellar goaltending performance either, the skaters did not make it easy to get a passable one either. All told, they came away from this one down by a score of 5-2, but the loss stung even more than one might expect from a three-goal deficit.
And head coach Ian Laperriere didn’t mince words about this performance when asked about it after the game.
Was there any player he was happy with?
“No. No one can go home and say ‘I did my job, including me.'”
Was there something he liked, on the power play or otherwise?
“No, nothing was good tonight… I’m not happy about anything”
And as far as what particularly went on in this one, Laperriere explained that they way he saw it, “sometimes guys think it’s gonna be easy because we got big names in our lineup, and we got humbled. And hopefully — not hopefully, I know these guys — we will learn from this.” So it was lack of preparation, lack of execution, lack of respect for the difficulty of the task ahead of them, a whole amalgamation of errors that bit them in their season debut, but the hope was for a positive response, and with a very quick turnaround before a Sunday afternoon game, the door was wide open for it.
And while the early returns in Sunday’s game were not looking positive — the Phantoms fell into a two-goal hole inside the first four minutes of play, with just 13 seconds separating those two goals — the Phantoms didn’t let things get out of hand, buckling down enough to stop Belleville’s scoring there, and going on to score five unanswered goals for a commanding win themselves.
Sunday’s was admittedly a strange game — there was a whopping total of 20 minor penalties and two five-minute fighting majors called across the whole of this game, so five-on-five play and any momentum that would come with it was hard to come by. And this feels like any easy setting for things to get disjointed and messy, but the Phantoms were able to make something out of very little. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a step in the right direction for a team who sorely needed it.
It’s worth contextualizing things here: this is not just the AHL squad of a rebuilding team that has a bunch of prospects on it, it’s the youngest roster Laperriere has had to work with since the COVID shortened season wherein many veteran players were called up to NHL taxi squads and teenage OHL players were allowed to join while their regular league remained paused. The level of competition is higher this year, and it isn’t going to be an easy or smooth go of things, not always. With 15 of the 25 players on the roster to start the season being aged 25 or younger, we can more than reasonably expect to see some hiccups and growing pains.
But Laperriere doesn’t see this youth as an easy out or excuse when things go wrong, but rather just their reality, and one that he accepts, “that’s why I’m here… there’s teams down the road, they play their old guys, I’m here to play the young guys. They need to learn from their mistakes, they need to get better. That’s where the organization is right now, we’re rebuilding, and it starts with us.”
Making mistakes, living with them, and learning from them seems to be the name of the game right now.
This weekend, we saw quickly how things can go sideways when a young team gets in over its head, but we also saw the resilience of a young group coming together and working to make things right again. And this, in many ways, feels like it should be the true expectation for this season. Development, we know well, is not linear, neither on an individual level nor on a team level. This is a team that will have to work for the success it finds, and it might not always be pretty. But the process of growth, when done right, as they are committed to, is always a rewarding one. The highs feel higher when a result of good work — we saw that this weekend too.
This isn’t a perfect season that the Phantoms, or we as viewers, are staring down here. But it is still one with heaps of promise.
