Mitten State hockey, from the NHL to the NTDP.

Mitten Hockey story card: Flint Firebirds, OHL
,

What’s powering the Firebirds’ start and what it will take to last

Two top scorers, real depth, and a crease with options have Flint near the top of the West, and one special-teams fix could keep it there.

Shaun
5–7 minutes
, ,

The Flint Firebirds came into this season promising more experience than the franchise has ever had. Seventeen games in, that promise looks like it was more than preseason talk. Flint is 11-5-1-0 with 23 points, a .676 points percentage, and in October it picked up points in eight straight games.

The question now is whether the start is the foundation of a real run or a hot stretch the rest of the West Division will catch. Mitten Hockey’s take: the foundation is real, and the fix the team needs most is a fixable one.

Built on last season

This didn’t come out of nowhere. The Hockey News’ season preview noted that Flint had a team-best regular-season finish in 2025-26, then won a first-round playoff series before falling to Windsor in the second round. The Firebirds lost Kevin He, Alex Kostov, Mason Vaccari, and Jacob Battaglia from that group, but the preview pointed to a returning core of Jimmy Lombardi, Charlie Murata, and Darian Anderson, plus goaltender Trenten Bennett, and predicted Flint “should have more experience than they ever have before.”

The off-season additions filled specific holes. Bennett arrived to play in goal, Nick Bogas came over in a trade with Sarnia, import Martins Klaucans joined the club, and American forward Cooper Williams added scoring depth. All four have played real roles.

Two engines up front

The simplest explanation for Flint’s start is that its two best forwards have been as good as advertised. According to the Firebirds’ official statistics, Anderson and Lombardi share the team scoring lead with 22 points each. Anderson leads the club with 10 goals, and Lombardi has seven goals to go with a team-high 15 assists.

Lombardi has been especially reliable at the Dort Financial Center, where he stretched his home point streak to 10 games on Nov. 7, with 15 points in that span. Anderson has delivered in the big moments, including two goals and an assist in a 6-2 win over Saginaw on Oct. 24.

What makes the offense more than a two-man show is the next layer. Williams has 15 points, Xavier Tessier has 12, and Klaucans has 11. Others have chipped in, too: Rylan Fellinger is on a four-game point streak and scored his first two-goal OHL game on Nov. 7, Josh Bonnyman had his first multi-goal game in a 5-1 win at Sarnia on Nov. 1, and Carter Beauchesne had a career-high three assists that day. A team that gets offense from beyond its top two scorers can survive a cold week from its stars.

A crease with options

The other pillar is goaltending depth. Bennett, an overage netminder, was named the OHL’s Goaltender of the Week on Oct. 26 after going 2-0 with a 1.44 goals-against average and a .955 save percentage, including a 29-save shutout of the Soo Greyhounds. At that point, his .938 save percentage ranked second in the league.

Mason Courville has won big games, too, including a 34-save night against Sarnia on Oct. 10 and a 27-save win over Saginaw on Oct. 24. Having two goalies who can each win a game matters in the OHL, where three-games-in-three-days weekends are routine. Flint has already played two of them.

The October run, and the work left

The high point came in late October. After taking all four points from Saginaw in the Oct. 23-24 home-and-home, Flint sat second in the West Division. The shutout of the Soo the next day left the Firebirds at 9-2-1-0 with points in eight straight games, and the Nov. 1 win at Sarnia made it eight wins in 10.

The most recent weekend, the start of a four-game homestand, was a reminder that the details still need sharpening. Flint lost to Erie and Brampton, and the power play went 0-for-7 across the two games. That unit was a weapon a few weeks ago: it scored twice in the first period of the Oct. 24 win over Saginaw and went 2-for-4 that night. Getting it back to that level is the clearest single lever Flint can pull.

The encouraging part is what didn’t change. Flint still scored four goals in each of those games without a power-play goal, and the depth scoring that defined October was still there. Power-play droughts come and go. A team that scores four a night at home without it has a solid floor.

The view from Saginaw

Any Flint story eventually runs down I-75. The Saginaw Spirit are 7-8-2-1 with 17 points through 18 games, six points behind Flint with a game more played. They came into the weekend on an eight-game losing streak, but they showed what they can be on Nov. 7, when Dima Zhilkin scored twice, reaching 14 goals on the season, and Brady Knowling earned his first OHL shutout in a 5-0 win over Erie. Zhilkin opened the season with a 13-game point streak, and a team with that kind of finisher and a goalie capable of nights like that is not one to write off in November.

Flint holds the edge in the season series so far, after a shootout win in Saginaw and a 6-2 win in Flint. The rest of the season series will go a long way toward settling the West Division race, and rivalry games have a way of tightening a race.

Can it hold up?

Mitten Hockey’s lean is yes, with a caveat. The things that drove the start are the sustainable kind: two top scorers producing at nearly the same rate, real secondary scoring, and two goalies the team trusts. Those don’t usually vanish in a week.

The caveat is the Western Conference itself. Flint’s .676 points percentage is a strong pace, but in a conference this competitive, a long slump on special teams could cost seeding by spring. A top seed is the realistic goal, and it is within reach. Whether this group can push all the way to an OHL title is a bigger leap that the evidence can’t settle in November.

The homestand continues Friday, Nov. 13, when the Ottawa 67’s visit the Dort. It is a good early test of whether the October version of the Firebirds is the real one.

Related

Watch

Watch: Firebirds-Steelheads highlights from Nov. 7 (Flint Firebirds on CHL.ca)

Sources

Leave a Reply

Trending