Patrick Williams, TheAHL.com Features Writer
Twenty years ago, two players joined the Philadelphia Phantoms, helped to lead them to a Calder Cup championship, and soon became building blocks for the parent Philadelphia Flyers.
You’d be hard-pressed to find a better story of the co-existence of developing and winning in the AHL.
In the spring of 2005, Jeff Carter and Mike Richards came straight out of the Ontario Hockey League and into key roles in the Calder Cup Playoffs. The Flyers had selected each of them in the first round of the 2003 NHL Draft – Carter 11th overall, Richards 24th – and were eager to get the 20-year-old forwards crucial pro development experience in the AHL.
Carter led the Phantoms with 12 goals and 23 points in 21 playoff games. Richards contributed 15 points in 14 games. Philadelphia won the Calder Cup in a four-game sweep of Chicago – culminating in front of 20,103 fans at the Wachovia Center, still the largest postseason crowd in AHL history.
Richards would later serve as captain of the Flyers for three years. He and Carter led the team to the Stanley Cup Final in 2010. They would win two championships together with Los Angeles, and combined to play more than 2,300 regular-season and playoff games in the National Hockey League.
This year’s Phantoms team, which moved from Philadelphia to Glens Falls in 2009 and on to Allentown in 2014, isn’t the powerhouse that the 2005 team was; the workmanlike group got into the Calder Cup Playoffs as the fifth seed in the Atlantic Division before eliminating Wilkes-Barre/Scranton, and is now one win away from knocking off their archrivals from Hershey in the division semifinals.
But what is happening in Lehigh Valley this spring should have a considerable impact on Philadelphia’s long-term outlook.
And back in 2005, the Flyers had just come within a win of reaching the Stanley Cup Final a year earlier. They went on to reach the Stanley Cup Playoffs in 2006, bottomed out for one season, and then had put themselves back into the Stanley Cup Final by 2010. The Flyers of today, still looking to sort out their coaching staff for next fall, are engaged in an ongoing rebuilding effort. They have missed the Stanley Cup Playoffs five consecutive seasons, matching the longest drought in the proud franchise’s long history.
What happens in Lehigh Valley this spring and beyond could and should have a considerable impact on Philadelphia’s long-term outlook. Emil Andrae, a second-round pick by the Flyers in 2020, played 42 NHL games this season and looks every bit like a long-term fit with the NHL team. Rodrigo Ābols, Helge Grans and Jacob Gaucher made their NHL debuts with Philadelphia this season. continues his development on the Lehigh Valley blue line. Nikita Grebenkin, acquired in a March deal with the Toronto Maple Leafs, has shown considerable promise as well.
And then, two decades after Carter and Richards, there are forwards Jett Luchanko and Alex Bump. One is an 18-year-old first-round pick from last year’s NHL Draft. The other is a 21-year-old fifth-rounder from the 2022 draft class who is playing like someone selected much higher.
Luchanko, who doesn’t turn 19 until August, made the Flyers out of training camp before returning to junior, where he had 56 points (21 goals, 35 assists) in 46 games with Guelph of the OHL this season. With Lehigh Valley, he has five assists in six games during the postseason. Bump won a national championship at Western Michigan University last month, leading his team with 23 goals and 47 points in 42 games. Since turning pro, the 21-year-old had one goal and two assists in two quick regular-season appearances with the Phantoms before adding two more goals in the playoffs so far.
Luchanko and Bump are trying to take in as much as possible on this postseason run. It’s never nearly as easy as Carter and Richards made it look 20 years ago. There is the adjustment to the pro game at the very time of the year that the level of play begins to peak.
With the PPL Center just a short commute from Philadelphia, they also play in front of a large contingent of Flyers management nightly. Player development has come a long way in the last 20 years, with extensive training plans, development and skills coaches, team chefs, and a facility like the one in Allentown that is essentially just a scaled-down version of an NHL building with all of the resources that entails.
The Flyers organization works to ease that transition to the pro game, and Bump says that this adjustment has gone smoothly.
“The best kind of hockey,” Bump said of the playoffs. “The guys in the locker room are making sure I know what I need to know, what I have to do. It’s super-easy just to walk into, get the systems down, and all the guys here are looking out for me.”
There is also the affable, easy-to-talk-to head coach Ian Laperriere, a former seventh-round draft pick who went on to play 1,083 games in the NHL. He worked as a Flyers assistant coach for nine seasons before taking the Lehigh Valley post in 2021. Two young players – one still a teenager – can learn a thing or two from someone like that.
“A player’s coach, for sure,” Bump said of Laperriere. “He gets it. He’s been through it. He knows what it’s like to be a young guy and play in pro hockey. Any mistakes I make, he’s there to correct it so it won’t happen again. He’s just been there for me when I need something.”
Luchanko has had plenty to take in this season. He played for John Tortorella in training camp and early in the season before returning to Guelph, where he was coached by long-time NHL forward Cory Stillman. He went to the IIHF World Junior Championship with Canada at midseason, and now there is his ongoing education with the Phantoms.
“It’s been a good way to finish up the season here,” Luchanko said, “play with some pretty good players, get to play playoff hockey. They’ve all welcomed me really well.
“I’ve been a lot of different places,” he continued, “so it’s kind of cool to see the ways teams work and day-to-day things that guys do to play this game as their job. It was cool to see how things work there (in Philadelphia), and it’s easy motivation for me to hopefully go back next year.”
Next year’s training camp is still four months away. Decisions will be made then, but certainly everything that happens now with the Phantoms will go into determining the immediate futures of Bump, Luchanko and the rest of these Philadelphia prospects.
For now, though, the focus is on Game 5 in Hershey on Sunday, and a run in the Calder Cup Playoffs to pursue. Carter and Richards took this path 20 years ago. Do it right, and there can be a championship and a long NHL career ahead.
On the American Hockey League beat for 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 2016.
