One of the top college hockey players by the close of his career at Denver, Massimo Rizzo — brought in to the organization in a prospect swap with the Hurricanes and, effectively, as a return for jettisoning off Tony DeAngelo — came into his rookie season in the AHL with the Phantoms with some real intrigue around him, but the season that panned out was a difficult one. Plagued by injury and some up and down play, Rizzo’s still working on finding his footing in this league, and under new leadership, there’s a hope remaining that he can right this ship in his second go around.
| Games played | Goals | Assists | Points | PIM | Shots on goal | Shooting percentage |
| 46 | 6 | 12 | 18 | 10 | 33 | 18.2 |
Given the depth role that Rizzo largely played for the Phantoms this season, the offense that he was able chip in for a team that was certainly at times starved for offense was respectable, as a pace that was just about on par with much of the middle of the offense’s contributors. It isn’t a world-beating total, but it’s definitely solid enough.
The point that casts a shadow over this impact, of course, is that shooting percentage, which is quite a bit higher than we might expect to see from someone who played a larger sample of games at this level. So while there are things that Rizzo is doing to create better offense and to help boost that shooting efficiency (more on that later), we do expect that conversion rate to dip on him next season, and his job will get a little harder to keep up with that level of impact.
| Games Tracked | Corsi-For % | Scoring Chances-For % | High Danger Chances-For % | Primary Shot Assists | Secondary Shot Assists |
| 8 | 62.67 | 67.57 | 66.67 | 8 | 3 |
It’s a small sample size, but Rizzo’s underlying impacts were, on the whole, quite solid. Even on a team that was, on the whole, driving play well, the ice was being tilted significantly more in their favor when Rizzo was on the ice (getting close to a 10 percent better share of the offense than the team average in those minutes). Now, some of this might be a product of the matchups themselves, as Rizzo was generally playing down in the lineup, in the team’s bottom-six, but it remains that he was contributing to creating a good volume of dangerous chances in the limited shifts for his line. The same could be said for Rizzo’s individual impacts, as well — across these eight games tracked, Rizzo only put up five individual shot attempts, but each of them was a high danger chance, while eight of his 11 shot assists were primaries (meaning his was the last touch before the shot was put on net). It’s far from the volume shooter role that others in the lineup found, but it was an efficient impact, if nothing else.
Three Questions
Did he live up to expectations?
As we mentioned at the top, it was something of a strange season for Rizzo. Fresh off a very successful final college season with Denver that capped off with a National Championship win, there was a lot of excitement surrounding Rizzo, and a lot of optimism that his move from college hockey’s most difficult conference to the AHL could be a reasonably seamless one. But his season was held up before it even properly started — after getting his feet wet in the Phantoms’ preseason, he was sidelined after he needed an appendectomy, and was held off the ice until the end of November. It was slow going to get back up to game speed, and while he brought some real positive flashes of high-end skill, flashes it remained, and his inconsistent play on the other side of a nearly three week absence in March (when he was out this time with an upper-body injury) had his spot in the lineup less secure, as he was first being rotated in and out down the stretch and then found himself outside the mix for a lineup spot in the postseason entirely. So, all told, this was certainly a season with its fair share of challenges, and while some of the expectations for Rizzo might have been a bit outsized from the start, it’s also probably fair to say this wasn’t the season he imagined for himself either.
What would we like to see him improve on next season?
Many of the issues that plagued Rizzo’s game in his first season in the AHL began with his skating. This has always been a more notable weaker point in his game, but he was able to work around those limitations at the college level with his hockey sense, but he wasn’t able to do that to the same degree with the Phantoms. Now, it’s hard to say how much of this was tied to that abdominal surgery he underwent in the fall — nearly two months is a long time to be sidelined, and those abdominal injuries can take a while longer to fully heal beyond when the player is technically ready to return to play — but given the lack of power in his stride that seemed to plague him through the back half of the season, it feels fair to wonder if there were some lingering effects from the surgery compounding some of the existing pace issues. And this is all to say that there is room for some optimism that, with a full and healthy offseason to put in some targeted work to add more power in his stride, that Rizzo will be able to make a step forward in his second season with the Phantoms. It will be a much needed one — between the Phantoms’ intent to move to a more up-tempo, transition focused system and the looming shooting percentage regression, if Rizzo is able to gain back a step, it will go a long way towards allowing him to fit more seamlessly in with the team’s preferred play style, while also making his offensive game a bit more threatening to offset the fact that he likely won’t be getting quite the same amount of luck this season. Pace is the big thing here, and it could well be the thing that unlocks the next level of his game, so long as he rises to that occasion.
What can we expect from him next season?
Despite the fact that they won’t be getting Jett Luchanko back for the regular season after he offered them a much-needed boost down the middle back in the playoffs, the Phantoms have still brought in some reinforcements at the center position for this season, and while this is certainly good news for the team on a collective level, it’s another challenge laid in front of Rizzo, as it means the competition for those top minutes is going to be heating up. A lot will depend on how he looks in the Phamtoms’ camp and preseason games, but we can expect that he’ll begin the season playing in a similar depth role, but with the opportunity in front of him to move up if his play demands it.
It’s going to be a big season for Rizzo, to be sure — already 24 years old and heading into the final season of his entry level deal, he still has some runway ahead of him to make a statement and carve out a role for himself in this organization, but