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Flyers Black Friday Gameday: 11/24/23 vs. NYR; Phantoms Update |
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Preview: Flyers vs. Rangers
In the team's annual Black Friday home matinee, the Philadelphia Flyers (10-8-1) will host the New York Rangers (13-3-1) in a match between former Rangers head coach John Tortorella and former Flyers bench boss Peter Laviolette's current clubs. Game time at the Wells Fargo Center is 1:00 p.m. ET.
The Flyers enter this game coming off a 3-2 road loss to the New York Islanders on Wednesday evening. Cam York (3rd goal of the season) and Joel Farabee (8th) scored in a losing cause for the Flyers. Philly cut deficits of 2-0 and 3-1 to a single goal but could not find an equalizer despite attempting 81 shots and putting 36 on net. The loss in Elmont ended the Flyers' winning streak at five games.
The Rangers, who are 8-1-1 in their last 10 games, enter Black Friday coming off a 1-0 road win on Wednesday against the Pittsburgh Penguins. A first-period goal by Alexis Lafreniere (8th of the season) stood the rest of the way as the game's only tally. Jonathan Quick notched a 32-save shutout.
Neither team practiced on U.S. Thanksgiving Day. After this game, the Flyers will head back to Elmont to play the Islanders at UBS Arena again on Saturday. The Rangers will return home for a Saturday afternoon game against the Boston Bruins (14-1-3) at Madison Square Garden.
For an in-depth preview of today's game, looking at the matchups at 5-on-5 and both sides of special teams, see Five Things on PhiladelphiaFlyers.com. Projected lineups below are based on Wednesday's lineups. In the Flyers' case, it's based on the lines that appeared for the majority of the game, as Tortorella and assistant coach Rocky Thompsoon juggled combos after the first period. The starting lineups are subject to change -- for example, if Morgan Frost and/or Louie Belpedio get back into Philly's lineup -- and will be updated shortly before game time as needed.
FLYERS
71 Tyson Foerster - 14 Sean Couturier - 11 Travis Konecny
74 Owen Tippett 25 Ryan Poehling - 89 Cam Atkinson
86 Joel Farabee - 27 Noah Cates - 10 Bobby Brink
44 Nic Deslauriers - 21 Scott Laughton - 19 Garnet Hathaway
8 Cam York - 6 Travis Sanheim
24 Nick Seeler - 26 Sean Walker
18 Marc Staal - 5 Egor Zamula
79 Carter Hart
[33 Samuel Ersson]
RANGERS
20 Chris Kreider - 93 Mika Zibanejad - 17 Blake Wheeler
10 Artemi Panarin - 16 Vincent Trochek - 13 Alexis Lafreniere
50 Will Cuylle - 12 Nick Bonino - 24 Kaapo Kakko
26 Jimmy Vesey - 21 Barclay Goodrow - 71 Tyler Pitlick
79 K'Andre Miller - 8 Jacob Trouba
55 Ryan Lindgren - 6 Erik Gustafsson
6 Zac Jones - 4 Braden Schneider
32 Jonathan Quick
31 Igor Sheshkertin
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Phantoms Gameday: Phantoms vs. P-Bruins
Returning home from a sweep of a three-game Canadian road trip, Ian Laperriere's Lehigh Valley Phantoms (8-6-2) will host Ryan Mougenel's Providence Bruins (6-8-3) at the PPL Center on Friday evening. Game time is 7:05 p.m. ET. The game will be streamed on AHL TV (subscription required).
The Phantoms could hardly have hoped for better performances than they received during the recent road trip. Against the Laval Titan last Friday, the Phantoms took a shutout into the late stages of the third period before prevailing, 3-2. The next night, Lehigh Valley laid a thrashing on the Belleville Senators in an 8-1 blowout that saw thirteen different Phantoms players record at least one point. The trip concluded with a solid 2-1 win over the Toronto Marlies on Tuesday. Again, Lehigh Valley flirted with a shutout until the latter stages of the final period.
Entering Friday's game, Olle Lycksell tops the Phantoms with 11 goals and 15 points in 16 games, followed by Cooper Marody (5g, 9a). Reigning AHL Player of the Week honoree Tanner Laczynski has four goals and 10 assists over 14 points overall, while rookie winger Samu Tuomaala has 13 points (3g, 10a) and has been making some especially slick setup passes of late. Fellow rookie J.R. Avon (3g, 2a in 11 games) has taken a noticeable step forward in November after starting out the season on SOIR with the Flyers.
The Phantoms' leading goal scorer as a rookie last season, Elliot Desnoyers (2g, 5a in 12 games) had a tough preseason with the Flyers and got off to a slow start with the Phantoms in the regular season. He started to pull his offensive game back together, however, until suffering an upper-body injury on a very questionable hit by huge-framed Hershey Bears defensman Dmitry Osipov (6-foot-4, 230 pounds) on Nov. 12. He has not played since then. However, Desnoyers felt well enough to join the recent road trip, and appears to be awaiting clearance to return.
The younger members of the Phantoms blue line -- Emil Andrae, Ronnie Attard, Helge Grans, and Adam Ginning -- have had some ups and downs this season and the Flyers' Hockey Ops staff deemed none immediately ready for an NHL recall (note: this is per a quote from Flyers head coach John Tortorella). It should be noted, however, that several of the defense prospects, particularly Attard, played well on the recent road trip. Rookie defenseman Andrae scored a really nice bar-down goal in Belleville before missing the game in Toronto due to illness.
Power forward Wade Allison got off to a very rough start with Lehigh Valley this season after being waived by the Flyers and sent down to the AHL. Laperriere, at one point, demoted Allison to the fourth line for several games and said it was time for the player to get over the disappointment of being in Allentown rather than Philadelphia. The head coach publicly challenged Allison to follow the example Laczynski has set in being a leader and turning the negative of going back to the AHL after spending last season with the Flyers into a positive.
Since that time, Allison has gradually started to look more like the player he showed he could be (when healthy) in previous seasons. He's been moved back up in the lineup and is winning battles again, playing with more physical edge and getting scoring chances. He's only at four points (2g, 2a) in 15 games -- illness kept him out of one game -- but he's been much more effective in recent weeks than he was in October.
In net, the Phantoms have some decisions to make now that Felix Sandström has cleared waivers and been assigned by the Flyers to Lehigh Valley. Veteran goalie Cal Petersen, who delivered a win for the Flyers in Los Angeles when Carter Hart was out due to a case of food poisoning, has started to round into form after an erratic start to the season.
Meanwhile, 30-year-old backup goalie Parker Gahagen (4-3-1, 2.48 GAA, .914 save percentage) has quietly been one of the early season's most pleasant surprises for the Phantoms. The former Army and ECHL goalie has given the Phantoms a chance to win almost every game in which he's played. He's been more consistent than Petersen overall. However, he's strictly a minor league goalie on an AHL contract, while both Sandström and Petersen (with a $5 million cap hit the Flyers mostly absorb even with him in the AHL) are on NHL deals.
Sandström, in particular, needs playing time. He's only played one full game since the preseason. He made two conditioning assignment starts for Lehigh Valley but sustained an injury (which landed him on IR for a week) in the first period of the latter start.
The more likely scenario now is that the Phantoms roll with Sandström and Petersen as tandem starters and send Gahagen to the ECHL's Reading Royals with a thank you for his solid work and a pledge to recall him if an opportunity arises. That's the life of an ECHL/AHL goalie. But Gahagen's play, on its merits, deserves extended AHL time somewhere.
Philadelphia Flyers Blogger •NHL.com • 
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