The Philadelphia Phantoms passed away quietly last Friday night in a 1-0 road loss to the Hershey Bears, ending the AHL's 13-year run in Philadelphia.
Hershey, a Calder Cup favourite this spring, closed out the Philadelphia Flyers' AHL affiliate with a four-game sweep that led even Philadelphia head coach John Paddock to concede the Bears' superior roster depth.
"It's a sad ending to something that was very special to all of us," said goaltending coach Neil Little, a mainstay in Philadelphia's net for years.
Now the Phantoms will head to Glens Falls, N.Y., and take their Flyers affiliation with them after the AHL approved the move on Tuesday. The team's Philadelphia home, the Spectrum, will be demolished at an unknown future date to make room for a retail complex.
Glens Falls, a town of 14,000 in upstate New York, hosted the AHL for 20 seasons before the Adirondack Red Wings went dormant a decade ago. The Phantoms are under new ownership after Comcast-Spectacor, the Phantoms' former owner, sold the club on February 4. The 4,806-seat Glens Falls Civic Center will house the club, and a team name will be announced at a later date.
The season-ending loss concluded with a low-key and silent Philadelphia dressing room, a playoff roster mostly devoid of the proven AHL veterans. The quiet punctuated Philadelphia's low-key disappearance from the AHL map. Only a furious late-season run in which the Phantoms clawed away at a 12-point gap that the Binghamton Senators once owned had even allowed Paddock's club to slip into the final playoff spot on the final weekend of the season.
Little was quiet and low-key around the Phantoms a decade ago, however. A veteran-packed roster that won the Phantoms a Calder Cup in only their second season, three consecutive 100-point seasons and sell-out crowds at the storied 17,380-seat Spectrum quickly made Philadelphia an elite AHL franchise in the late-1990s and fostered a fierce, often blood-spilling Pennsylvania rivalry with the Bears.
AHL stars Peter White, John Stevens and Neil Little helped anchor the Phantoms' roster of that era, and legendary AHL enforcer Frank "The Animal" Bialowas and a cast of enforcers made the blood flow on Broad Street once more. Bill Barber, enshrined in the Hockey Hall of Fame, stepped behind the Philadelphia bench and guided the Phantoms through their first four seasons while waging a heated coaching battle with Hershey's Bob Hartley.
The Phantoms spawned two NHL coaches in Barber and Stevens. Patrick Sharp, Brian Boucher, Antero Niittymaki, Mark Eaton, Richard Park, Alexandre Picard and Dennis Seidenberg are among the players the club graduated to the NHL duty. Current Flyers stars Jeff Carter, Mike Richards and Claude Giroux logged brief AHL stints in Philadelphia. A host of well-known AHL names that includes Peter Vandermeer, Brad Tiley, Michel Picard and Dennis Bonvie spent time with the Phantoms.
Those days now gone, the Phantoms spent the past weekend conducting exit interviews at the practice facility that they have shared with the Flyers in Voorhees, N.J., a Philadelphia suburb. The players' departure leaves only what remains of a skeleton front-office crew to tend to the club's final off-ice business affairs before the AHL departs Philadelphia.
The new owners, Pittsburgh-based Brooks Group, have publicly indicated a desire to eventually locate the Phantoms in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley, an area located an hour north of Philadelphia that also hosts a Triple-A baseball team. However, the area does not have an arena capable of hosting hockey and while there has been some political support for building an AHL-capable arena, no firm plans have been announced. A deadline to reach a building deal has been set for August 1.
Philadelphia's departure from the AHL saddened Bialowas, who remained in the Philadelphia area following his retirement and returned to the Spectrum for the club's final regular-season game on April 10.
The Phantoms played 1,116 regular-season and playoff games over their 13 seasons. A sell-out crowd of 17,380, the Phantoms' 21st Spectrum sell-out, closed out the Spectrum's regular-season slate for a Bears-Phantoms tilt. The Phantoms dominated the Bears that even, taking a 5-2 decision that nudged the Phantoms into the playoffs and a spring date with the archrival Bears.
Phantoms fans dished up a typically rowdy Philadelphia atmosphere. Now those fans who wish to still see live hockey will be forced to pay NHL ticket prices for the Flyers, head to Hershey or Wilkes-Barre/Scranton for AHL play or sample nearby ECHL (Reading and Trenton) and NCAA clubs (Princeton).
"The bottom line is for the fans," Bialowas said. "It's terrible for them. I don't think that I ever thought (the Phantoms would leave Philadelphia)".
Joining Bialowas that evening was long-time Phantoms defenceman John Slaney, who scored his first NHL goal in the Spectrum while a member of the Washington Capitals. The AHL's all-time leading scorer among defencemen spent seven seasons with the Phantoms earlier this decade.
"The town is a hockey town," Slaney said. "A sports town, I should say."
Bialowas, Slaney and Little joined Boyd Kane, Philadelphia's final AHL captain, in an on-ice pre-game ceremony before that final regular-season home tilt.
Also on hand was Barber, who is the only person to win both a Stanley Cup as a Flyer and a Calder Cup as a Phantom at the Spectrum. Barber's Flyers won the Stanley Cup in May 1974 on home ice, and Barber coached the Phantoms to their first Calder Cup in 1998, taking out the Saint John Flames in six games.
"I was one of the fortunate guys to experience championships here at the NHL level, and also the Calder Cup in 1998 was a great thrill," Barber said.
The Phantoms sold-out the Cup-clinching game on a June evening in 1998 and sold 13,000 of those tickets in fewer than two days for the contest. The Phantoms secured their first Calder Cup against a Flames team that featured Martin St. Louis, Jean-Sebastien Giguere, Denis Gauthier, Marty Murray, Clarke Wilm and Jim Dowd, among other future NHLers. In 2005, the Phantoms took out a Chicago roster that included Jay Bouwmeester, Braydon Coburn and Kari Lehtonen to capture the club's second Calder Cup, this one coming on home ice before 20,103 fans at the Wachovia Center.
Former Phantoms chief operating officer Frank Miceli grew up near the Spectrum and guided the Phantoms off the ice for 12 of their 13 seasons before departing for a job last year in San Antonio. Miceli recalled that Philadelphia was seen as something of a gamble when plans were announced in 1995 to relocate the Flyers' AHL affiliation from Hershey to Philadelphia. The Phantoms would serve as the Spectrum's new tenant after the Flyers headed to the Wachovia Center.
Philadelphia had hosted previous incarnations of the AHL, but the Phantoms leave town as the city's biggest AHL success story by far. Prior to the Phantoms, the AHL's first return to Philadelphia since 1979, the AHL was largely restricted to small markets. Baltimore was the only large market hosting the AHL when the Phantoms debuted in 1996, and the Maryland city had long endured box-office troubles. Philadelphia's early success spurred movement into Toronto, Winnipeg, Chicago, Houston, Cincinnati and other big-city homes.
Miceli believes that securing Barber as the club's first head coach to go along with Bob Clarke as the club's first general manager gave the Phantoms immediate credibility in the crowded Philadelphia sports marketplace. The club also targeted families and priced tickets well below the local norm for Philadelphia sports fans accustomed to major-league prices.
"We really hung our hat on that affordability angle," Miceli explained.
Those days are now gone, as is apparently the AHL's presence in the City of Brotherly Love. It was left to Little, the only Phantom to spend time with both the 1996-97 and 2008-09 clubs, to offer a eulogy for his club after its final game.
"It's been a fantastic franchise," Little summarized, "and I think that everyone is quite sorry to see the end of a very good thing."
