Oliver Bonk couldn’t help but smile when he walked into the Flyers’ locker room and saw a tight quarterfinals matchup between Canada and Czechia on the televisions.<\/p>\n
This was an interesting one for his family.<\/p>\n
Bonk is Canadian and represented his country twice at the IIHF World Junior Championship. But he speaks the Czech language pretty well. That’s because his father Radek Bonk, who played 14 years in the NHL, is from Czechia.<\/p>\n
“I’m sure he’s cheering for Czech,” Bonk said Wednesday, “it’s his country of birth.”<\/p>\n
The Flyers’ 21-year-old prospect was rooting for Canada and saw his country pull off a comeback to beat Czechia, 4-3, in overtime.<\/p>\n
The bragging rights had to be nice and so, too, had to be the opportunity to practice with the Flyers this week. Bonk and Hunter McDonald joined the big club for a couple of days to help the team over the Olympic break.<\/p>\n
“They always make a good impression,” Nick Seeler said Saturday. “They’re kids that want to learn and get better. That’s all you can ask for, they’re kind of sponges when they come up and they work hard.”<\/p>\n
Both defensemen returned to AHL affiliate Lehigh Valley for game action this weekend. For Bonk, games have been critical to him getting back up to speed. A lingering upper-body injury forced him out for all of training camp and the preseason. He didn’t make his debut with the Phantoms until December.<\/p>\n
“I’ve definitely got a lot more stretching and rehab to do before every skate now,” Bonk said. “Sometimes it’s a lot, but it teaches you how to be a pro early on and something you have to deal with. Hopefully now I’m past it and it doesn’t happen again.”<\/p>\n
The 2023 first-round pick<\/a> entered Saturday with seven points (two goals, five assists) and a minus-3 rating in 23 games for Lehigh Valley. Coming off the injury and playing his first season at the pro level<\/a>, Bonk didn’t race out of the chute. But he has gradually found his game.<\/p>\n “It has been unfortunate that he had to deal with the injury, but we’ve heard nothing but good things since probably the first little bit of just playing hockey again, which isn’t easy in the American League for a guy who hasn’t played in that league,” Flyers assistant coach Todd Reirden said Wednesday. “Probably a little bit of an adjustment period those first 10, 15 games. Now, things seem to be slowing down for him.”<\/p>\n Bonk noticed the difference, too.<\/p>\n “I feel like once I got 10 games in, I felt like I was back to normal,” he said. “I dropped some weight that I was carrying from just rehabbing and not skating as much, then I started feeling better on the ice, skating and stuff like that.”<\/p>\n The 6-foot-2 righty shot has a game built on intelligence. He keeps the puck out of his own net. But the Flyers liked that they could test Bonk’s quickness and pace this week.<\/p>\n “This was a practice that there were certain drills that were designed so that he could feel the NHL speed,” Reirden said. “We could evaluate that and also get him prepared for whenever that day comes that he’s able to pull a Flyers jersey on, because we think pretty highly of him.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Oliver Bonk couldn’t help but smile when he walked into the Flyers’ locker room and saw a tight…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":466355,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5112],"tags":[1468,2575,5,4,1467,56,5205],"class_list":{"0":"post-466354","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-philadelphia-flyers","8":"tag-flyers","9":"tag-flyers-news","10":"tag-hockey","11":"tag-nhl","12":"tag-philadelphia","13":"tag-philadelphia-flyers","14":"tag-philadelphiaflyers"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nhl\/116111648140943893","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466354","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=466354"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466354\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/466355"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=466354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=466354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=466354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}