As the offseason presses on, the Phantoms are continuing to tinker with their roster for next season, making new additions around the edges.
The team announced on Wednesday that they’ve signed forward Brady Berard and defenseman Andrew Perrott to contracts for the 2025-26 season. Berard, at 22, has just wrapped up his senior collegiate season, having spent the first two seasons at Providence College before transferring up the road to close out his college career at Boston College.
And Perrott, while still just 24 years old, is edging towards veteran status at the professional level. His name might be familiar to some fans, as he spent parts of the 2024-25 season with the Phantoms’ rival Hershey Bears, but he’s spent the majority of his four-year career in the pros bouncing back and fourth between the AHL and ECHL levels within the Rockford (Chicago) organization.
Where do these guys fit into the lineup?
As we alluded to off the top, despite what their youth might suggest about the runway that they could get here, these are players that we reasonably expect to serve as more like fringe pieces in this lineup. While there’s always a chance that the Phantoms’ staff — which has done well elsewhere with parts of the defense group over this last year — could get more out of him, but the usage Perrott has seen over the first four years of his professional career would tell us that he’s a player who’s better used in a limited role. He did manage to stick at the AHL level for the whole of the last season, but his toolkit is somewhat limited — though he does offer a whole lot in the way of physicality — but given the personnel that the Phantoms have elsewhere in their lineup, it’s easier to imagine him getting more matchup specific deployment.
And as for Berard, as he’s set to debut into the AHL in the fall, the world is his oyster. He’s a bit of an unknown for the staff, a question mark as to just how well his game will translate to this next level up in competition, and how quickly he can adjust, having not gotten the taste of play at this level at the close of last season, like a number of other recent college graduates — like Cole Knuble and Riley Thompson — did at the end of last season.
He should be in contention to earn some games in a depth center role for this team — his game is a bit simplistic when it comes to his touches on puck, and he didn’t produce much, just 12 goals and 22 points over 132 collegiate games with two quite solid programs, so it’s hard to imagine him getting boosted too high up the lineup — but that battle is going to be a tough one to nail down position in. That is, with even more veteran players, both of the league and this organization, in the mix for those same spots, that’s a lot of built-in caché that Berard would have to beat out as a rookie, which is a steep task, indeed. We’ll surely see him get some games at some point, but it’s going to take a huge, huge effort for him to win an every-night role outright.
Is it starting to get too crowded around here?
As we sit in the lingering energy of last season, when it definitely got a little too crowded in that lineup at times, it’s a fair question and a reasonable area for some concern.
The answer here, most simply, lies in just how these players are managed. It would be one thing if we see a huge excess of players left hanging around on the active Phantoms roster in the name of having as much depth at their immediate disposal as possible — that’s when you get into trouble of those fringe players going cold sitting in the press box, or else perhaps higher impact players having to take a seat in a critical matchup in the name of fairness and getting everyone reps at some point — but if the decision makers on the management side can be a bit less fussed about keeping as many pieces around as possible, to use the Royals as a place to keep their depth players who don’t have a consistent role at the moment fresher and more active, they’ll be in better shape.
A lesson that should have been learned from next season is that while organizational depth is a good thing, they shouldn’t be afraid to use it as such. The coaching staffs at all three levels spent some good time together before last season getting on the same page about their respective systems in order to make things as seamless as possible for players going not just between the AHL and NHL levels, but also those going from ECHL to AHL, and that hard work shouldn’t go to waste.
