The Phantoms’ opening weekend was a true tale of two halves: the season opener on Saturday night saw them looking commanding, playing with a high level of pace and creating a good volume of chances, popping a lot of their skill game while still keeping a noticeable level of physical engagement up, but that level of impact dipped significantly in the second half of that back-to-back, as the team brought a more listless and disjointed showing on the way to their first loss of the season to the division rival Penguins.
“Overall, I’ll be honest, I think we looked like a tired group,” head coach John Snowden assessed after that matchup, “I think mentally tired. With a 7:00 game last night, the emotions of the home opener and then you turn around and then you play at 3:00 the next day, it’s a pretty tough turnaround. Yes, [the Penguins] had to do the same thing, and they’ve been going through the same thing. I think we just gotta understand, that’s part of being a young team is that it’s not easy, especially with the turnarounds that we have and we get into the season deeper and we’re in three-in-threes it’s gonna be even harder, so we have to understand what we have to do to prepare ourselves for those games and understand that, you know, they’re on the same situation we are, [and] their energy was a little bit higher, a little bit more attacking on the inside and we’ll learn through it. I think, with a young group, we’re gonna have these moments. I said it to you guys from the start, some games we’re gonna walk in here and be like “wow, you guys were good tonight,” and we can come back the next night and we’re gonna be like “oof, we were not that good.” So, I expect that right now, and we’ll keep working out the kinks, we’ll keep teaching. That’s what our job is, we’re teachers, we keep hammering the points that we need to hammer and we’ll get everybody organized.”
While it’s clear how high the highs can be with having a team as young as this one — the skill level is through the roof and when they’re going on all cylinders, there’s a truly remarkable level of dynamism up and down the lineup — but it’s also worth remembering that there are bound to be some stumbles along the way, over the course of this long season, while this group of young players gets adjusted to the professional game. Emptying the tank on night one to secure a win in the home opener is understandable, but perhaps a bit too short-sighted of an approach, and that lesson was learned right from the jump.
And this weekend’s roadtrip out to Cleveland, then, while not having quite the same compression of games (it was a back-to-back, but this time both at 7:00), did present as a pretty immediate opportunity for the team to bounce back and prove that they’ve taken some of those hard lessons in learning to manage energy to heart, and they did well to rise to that challenge.
In the Saturday night showing, there was a lot to like in the Phantoms’ overall response to a bit of a lackluster previous showing — they had all four lines rolling, their penalty kill was perfect again, and they saw a lot of flash from both Alex Bump and Karsen Dorwart in their breakout showings, controlling the game nicely all the way to a 3-0 win, and Aleksei Kolosov’s first shutout in the league — and it was a positive response that, even more notably, they were able to carry right into Saturday’s rematch. This showing wasn’t quite as commanding for the Phantoms, as they stumbled a bit on the penalty kill and gave up a few more quality chances than they did the previous night, and while they managed to gain an early lead, they couldn’t hold on to it to coast into an easy regulation win, as the Monsters came up with the tying goal with just 2:20 remaining in the third period.
But where this late tying goal allowed could have been a big deflator, they didn’t let their focus dip, and they kept with it enough to stick around to the shootout, where Carson Bjarnason was perfect for them, and Carl Grundstrom came up with the break for them to secure the win after all. It was, all in all, a bit of a rollercoaster, and an effort which certainly left them with some notes on areas to clean up, but it was a step in the right direction as they brought a more sustained effort on the second night of a back-to-back against a tough and now highly motivated opponent.
The Phantoms are stringing together wins to start this season, which is a real positive, but as Snowden said from the beginning, this is a season most pointedly about learning lessons. It’s not a process that they necessarily expect to be linear, and there will all but certainly be mistakes made along the way, but these early returns show that this group has a willingness to learn and continue to pull in the right direction even in more challenging settings. And this might be the most promising early return of all.
