How Jakob Pelletier impressed in chance on third line against Stars
The Philadelphia Flyers have added just one roster player this season and they haven’t really been too sure how to use him. Jakob Pelletier was toiling away on the fourth line with Rodrigo Abols and Nicolas Deslauriers before a promotion to the third line this weekend.
With all due respect to those two fourth-liners, playing a recently acquired young player with them isn’t the best way to evaluate his play. Head coach John Tortorella admitted as much last week.
Tortorella, of course, decides what the lines are and how much ice time players get, and finally decided to get a look at Pelletier with some NHL-caliber players this weekend.
Pelletier joined Ryan Poehling on the third line with Olle Lycksell and Owen Tippett both seeing time on the other wing. The former first-round pick impressed in his 12:18 of ice time, all at 5-on-5.
The Flyers outshot the Stars 6-5 with Pelletier on the ice but the shot attempts show the true impact he had. The Stars only had eight shot attempts to the Flyers’ 18 in those 12 minutes, including an 8-3 advantage in scoring chances (4-2 high-danger). That all added up to 0.66 xGF and 0.18 xGA.
Pelletier also played against some tough competition. Over half of his minutes came against the Stars’ top defensive pair of Thomas Harley and Ilya Lyubushkin with around five minutes against the second line (Mason Marchment, Matt Duchene, and Mikael Granlund).
The diminutive forward didn’t end up with a point on the day, but he had a few decent scoring chances and set up a tap-in in front that just missed.
We watched every shift Pelletier played on Saturday in Dallas to get a closer look at what he brought to the Flyers’ third line and where he may fit within the organizational depth chart moving forward.
Pelletier was the 26th overall pick in 2019 and was nearly a point-per-game player in the AHL (51 goals and 79 assists for 130 points in 139 games), so the talent is there. His play sagged a bit on the second half of the back-to-back on Sunday in Chicago, but so did the rest of the team. We’ll see how Pelletier looks and where he lines up for the final 10 games of the Flyers season.
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