Projecting the Phantoms opening night roster

While the Flyers kicked off their season last night in Vancouver, their affiliate down in Lehigh Valley isn’t far behind them in the race to get back to real and meaningful game action. After wrapping up their three-game slate of preseason action last Sunday, and with some good practice time under their belts across this week, the Phantoms are set to open their season tonight at home against the Hartford Wolf Pack.

And this is set to be an interesting season for the Phantoms — coming on the heels of last season which saw them make a surprise run into the second round of the playoffs after a regular season where they really struggled for consistency (and indeed, seemed to limp into those playoffs in the first season), and with some extra skill added into the lineup to start things off, the expectation is that this is the year that they finally take a real step forward. The team is pretty well loaded with prospects, and while that will leave them susceptible to some growing pains to work through, this is likely the best on-paper lineup that recently extended head coach Ian Laperriere has had to work with in his tenure with the team, and this is really when they’ll need to start seeing the team string together some stronger underlying results, and those prospects to make some developmental jumps.

That’s the big picture project for the season, but it has to start somewhere. That somewhere, of course, is opening night, and ahead of that, we\'re going to take a moment to take a look at the roster, and make our best guess as to how it\'s all going to be configured.

Olle Lycksell - Rhett Gardner - Samu Tuomaala Oskar Eklind - Rodrigo Abols - Anthony Richard Elliot Desnoyers - JR Avon - Cooper Marody Garrett Wilson - Massimo Rizzo - Brendan Furry Notable extras: Alexis Gendron, Zayde Wisdom, Jacob Gaucher*

Adam Ginning - Ronnie Attard Hunter McDonald - Louie Belpedio Xavier Bernard - Helge Grans Notable extra: Ethan Samson

Cal Petersen (Alexei Kolosov) Notable extra: Eetu Makiniemi

Now, as is usually the case, the Phantoms are carrying a good number of extra bodies (including some more bubble players that we haven’t noted here), which gives them some extra flexibility with different looks they can try out in the lineup night to night, but for the very first game, we assume that they’ll be going heavy on older, more veteran players, leaving some of the prospects on the outside to start. On that veteran note as well, the Phantoms have something of an interesting wrinkle at work in their lineup, in that a good bit of organizational depth was added or retained during this offseason, but with the additions of Oskar Eklind and Rodrigo Abols — who are 26 and 28 respectively and veterans to the game of hockey but new to the AHL this season — they’re not having to fight against the league’s veteran rule (which precludes a team from dressing more than six players in a game who have played 260 or more games in the league). This will create a healthy bit of competition for lineup spots, but also might make things a little more difficult on those prospects who are trying to work their way in from the outside.

The defense group has already had a bit of a wrench thrown in the works already, as we were expecting to see Emil Andrae getting big minutes to start the season, but with him just being recalled to the Flyers to fill in for Nick Seeler, the Phantoms will be without him for the next little bit, and missing his impact.

We\'ll see how things look for them tonight, and perhaps the good news is that, with only one game on the schedule this weekend and then a layoff until next weekend, if there are things that immediately appear as being in need of tinkering, they\'ll have plenty of time to do that in practice before their schedule ramps up. But there\'s a lot at stake for the team this season, and the hope is that they can begin it on a high note.

Talking Points