[bigrangy]

Nobody is disappointed that Phillips hasn’t seen much NHL time because they think he’s the next Gaudreau. People are disappointed because they’ve had to watch Lucic/Lewis plug it up all year.

Is Phillips worse than Duehr? Mitch Love doesn’t think so, or Duehr would be playing the big minutes for the Wranglers. However, Duehr has fit in just fine on the big team and is fun to watch. So we have a player who plays the same position as Duehr, who is better than him, with a longer track record of success, but he’s stuck in the minors pretty much entirely because he’s half a foot shorter than the coach would like. Not because he’s worse at hockey.

The expectation for any AHL callup is just “don’t be the worst guy on the team”. As long as you’re not the worst, someone else should be in the pressbox instead of you. Duehr seems to be accomplishing this.

Now I know that there are differences when it comes to depth guys, a guy that is a PP ace in the AHL probably won’t get the PP time to stay effective in the NHL. I haven’t watched enough Wranglers games to know if Phillips is still effective at even strength.