Patrick Williams, TheAHL.com Features Writer
Sometimes there is no easing into the AHL season.
Sometimes your parent team struggles. Injuries hit. The night-to-night pressure intensifies rapidly. Through it all, the AHL club has to sort out its own affairs while also ready to provide immediate assistance to the NHL roster if needed.
For the Philadelphia Flyers and the Lehigh Valley Phantoms – their AHL affiliate 75 minutes to the north – it’s been a hectic few weeks.
Last season’s Flyers returned to the Stanley Cup Playoffs for the first time since 2020, while the Phantoms missed out on the Calder Cup postseason. On paper, Lehigh Valley’s 2026-27 roster looked promising, including newcomers Cam Dineen, Zach Aston-Reese, Nolan Foote, Jack Studnicka and Danila Klimovich. But then came Philadelphia’s nationally televised 7-0 loss at home to Pittsburgh on opening night. The skid reached nine games (0-6-3) before the Flyers got in the win column on Oct. 17. And injuries to Nikita Grebenkin, Travis Konecny, Cam York and Owen Tippett hampered the lineup.
In Allentown, the Phantoms allowed 15 goals in beginning the season with three losses, all on PPL Center ice, before rebounding with three wins in four nights last week. Alex Bump, who began the year with Philadelphia, sparked the turnaround by showing he can dominate at the AHL level. He totaled five goals and six points in the three games to earn Howies Hockey Tape/AHL Player of the Week honors.
But Bump went back up to the Flyers this week. The Phantoms have also lost Studnicka, Oliver Bonk, Hunter McDonald, Jacob Gaucher and Cole Knuble at various times to recalls. Philadelphia’s lineup for their 3-1 win in Buffalo on Wednesday included five AHL call-ups, with Knuble scoring his first two career NHL goals.
Knuble, the son of former Flyers forward Mike Knuble, is a 2023 fourth-round pick by Philadelphia. Gaucher went undrafted and had to sign a pair of AHL contracts with the Phantoms before earning his first NHL deal in December 2024. McDonald was a sixth-rounder who has worked his way through more than 150 games in the AHL. Bump went in the fifth round in 2022. All players that were overlooked, but who have filled a need for a Flyers organization that has struggled to reliably develop home-grown prospects of late.
That’s changing. Moreover, the Phantoms are showing that they can develop mid-round prospects and free agents, the sort of work that can make for a very productive system. They are the kinds of moves that pay off when the parent team is dealing with mounting losses and a banged-up roster. They needed a boost.
“I thought that the guys that we called up did a great job,” Flyers coach Rick Tocchet said after Monday’s victory against Colorado. “That’s a tough spot. I thought each one of them contributed.”
On the American Hockey League beat for more than two decades, TheAHL.com features writer Patrick Williams also currently covers the league for NHL.com and FloSports and is a regular contributor on SiriusXM NHL Network Radio. He was the recipient of the AHL’s James H. Ellery Memorial Award for his outstanding coverage of the league in 2015-16.
