Through these first five games of their first round series against the Penguins, the Flyers have been delivered standout performances from players up and down their lineup. That depth of production has been a major asset to them when they’re winning, but even in these more challenging moments of late, it’s been a real positive to see different players, and particularly their young guns, stepping up and taking an active role in driving the team towards more positive results.
After Monday’s loss in Pittsburgh, head coach Rick Tocchet shouted out rookie forwards Alex Bump and Denver Barkey as being standouts in his eyes in that showing. Bump picked up a goal in that game, his playoff debut, but was the team’s best driver of scoring chances in that game broadly, while Barkey stepped up for a few chances of his own, and as a true setter of pace and tone through the strength of his forechecking game, something he’s been able to do for the team virtually all series.
And these successes certainly make for cool moments for the players on individual levels — getting to jump into NHL playoff action is surely a dream on its own, much less doing so an immediately producing — and that immediate production that they’ve been tapping into has been a big difference maker for the team collectively, but the way that they’ve been able to jump in with easy comfort with playing a playoff style of hockey also speaks to the strength of the development being done elsewhere in the organization.
This season was a challenging one for the Phantoms. Setting aside the external factors thrust upon them — and these were numerous — the team had an uphill battle ahead of them to take one of their youngest teams assembled since they arrived in the Lehigh Valley and, with a brand new coaching staff at the helm, get them acclimated to a brand new system and get them comfortable playing a hard, professional game. The results on a collective level were sometimes uneven, and that unevenness certainly played a big part in the team ultimately missing the playoffs, but there’s no doubt that there were some critical lessons learned along the way.
Players like Bump and Barkey have had to learn hard lessons over the course of this season about the consistent pace that will be expected of them, the need to play through opponents rather than leaning excessively on eating up valuable possession time and hoping to maneuver around them, and the importance of getting to the interior for more dangerous chances and higher percentage plays, and while some of those lessons have been easier to have sink in than others, they stuck with it, and we’re seeing them look so effective in these moments as a direct result of that.
“I think our plan this year,” Phantoms head coach John Snowden explained earlier this month, “as a staff with [Phantoms assistants Nick Schultz and Terrence Wallin, video coach Patrick McDonough, and goaltending coach Brady Robinson], I think we’ve done a really good job at identifying how we want to use our development process and how we can implement it throughout the season. And obviously Riley is here and all our development coaches are accessible all the time. And I think we’ve done a really good job at, of just of teaching the game and teaching the little things inside of the game. All the things that matter organizationally, all the things that are going to matter for each player, and then what is their individual needs, and what do we need to teach those players. And I think, you know, I think we’ve shown this year and in one short year that we’ve been able to get to the players in a way where we can advance them and push them to where they need to be. And obviously we’re seeing with the [Bumps], the [Barkeys], the guys that are up right now, they’re making an impact with them. And then obviously our young players that are coming in now are making an impact with us. So, we’re just going to keep with that process. We’ll continue to grow and see how we can continue to grow that process and make it better. And our plan and our hope is to have the best development program in the league.”
The staff members at each level — from NHL all the way down to ECHL — put in some real dedicated work over the summer to get themselves on the same page about not just how they want to be running their on-ice systems to create a greater bit of organizational continuity, but also about what they’re trying to get out of these players, what they need to be seeing from them in order to feel they’re ready to graduate up, and we’re already seeing the fruits of those labors bearing out.
The fact that Bump and Barkey — and indeed Oliver Bonk, as well, who’s done so much to acclimate himself to the professional game so as to work himself into the conversation to slide into the lineup in the heat of this playoff matchup — have been able to take the lessons that that Phantoms’ coaching staff has been working to drive home in them and immediately implement them in these huge moments tells us that, even with the inconsistencies that came along the way, they’re doing something right down there.
It feels a stark turnaround from where this team was just a year ago, and an impressive bit of work put in to turn the system around in such a short amount of time.
What’s even more encouraging, too, is that this is only the beginning. Just as the players are working on polishing up their games, so too is the staff down at the minor league level honing their own approaches to teaching. And as exciting as this playoff push has been for the NHL squad, it isn’t lost on the organization that their position in the timeline of their rebuild hasn’t changed. They’re still squarely in a position where they need to find ways to develop their young players through their system and cycle them up to the highest level where they can be impact players to push this rebuild over the top. There’s still ample work left to be done, but there’s also ample reason for optimism that they final have the infrastructure in place to get that done.
