News Article: Next years Phantoms

[gib]

Originally Posted by pelts35.com

Varlamov spent the majority of his rookie year in Hershey as a backup.

Toskala split time with Kipper in his rookie year (Kipper's 2nd year)

Lehtonen split time in his rookie year in the AHL.

Cechmanek played 3 games in the AHL to start the season and then was called up.

I don't have a problem with Hovinen getting the majority of the starts in ADK next season, but having a veteran backup (not Leighton or Bacashihua) instead of Heeter would be preferable.

Hovinen is also 24-years old which I think will help him to settle in compared to a 19-year old rookie. It might be that 19-year old goalie is quicker to learn the tricks of smaller rinks, but in the big picture it's a good thing to be bit more matured. Hovinen will get good advices from Pasi Nurminen on how to play in in a smaller rink and how to prepare for it. Let's see how he recovers from that hip surgery. The talent is there, but is he able to translate it to NA rinks...

[GKJ]

Over the history of the Flyers-Phantoms relationship, they like to have the veteran guy so that if one of the NHL goaltenders gets hurt, he gets the callup, while the guy who they're trying to develop gets more games. For some strange reason though, the Flyers hardly run into injury problems with goaltenders outside of 2010, so we never get to see how they would handle having to actually use a third goaltender.