The Bellwater Frost open their AHL season this week at Anchor Arena with a defense corps that looks noticeably different from the one that lost in the first round of the playoffs last spring, after the team added veteran blueliner Anders Kellerman and cleared a full-time roster spot for rookie Jonas Riggins over the offseason.
The Frost signed veteran defenseman Anders Kellerman to a one-year contract in the offseason, betting that the 32-year-old’s steadying presence can anchor a blue line that struggled to clear its own zone consistently during last spring’s postseason. Kellerman, who has appeared in parts of five NHL seasons, said he chose Bellwater in part because of conversations with Brasher about the role he would play both on and off the ice.
“I didn’t come here to just eat minutes,” Kellerman said after a training camp practice at Anchor Arena. “Liam told me he wanted a defenseman who could talk to the younger guys during a game, not just after it. That’s the job I signed up for.”
A rookie earns his spot
Alongside Kellerman, the Frost will open the season with rookie defenseman Jonas Riggins in the lineup, a decision Brasher said was earned rather than handed to him during training camp. Riggins spent the past two seasons developing in the organization’s system and impressed the coaching staff enough during camp scrimmages to beat out two veteran depth options for the final roster spot on defense.
“We didn’t want to force a young player into the lineup just to check a box,” Brasher said. “Jonas won this job in camp. He made the decision easy for us, which is exactly what you want from a young player trying to make a team.”
Last spring taught us something uncomfortable about ourselves. We were a good enough team to make the playoffs, and we weren’t good enough on the back end to survive a tight series. You don’t fix that by hoping. You fix it by adding the right people and giving your young players a real chance to grow into bigger roles.
Liam Brasher, Head Coach, Bellwater Frost
Beaumont’s locker room
Captain Colton Beaumont, entering his fourth season wearing the letter, said the first-round exit lingered with the team throughout the offseason in a way that felt different from previous disappointments. “We didn’t lose that series because we were outclassed,” Beaumont said. “We lost it because we made mistakes in our own end that we should have been better than. That’s a fixable problem, and I think that’s part of why this team attacked the offseason the way it did.”
General Manager Petra Voss said adding Kellerman required creative work with the team’s budget, given the defenseman’s NHL experience and market value among AHL clubs looking to add veteran leadership. “We had competition for Anders,” Voss said. “We got him because he believed in the direction of this organization, not just because of anything we offered financially.”
The Frost open the season at home against the Granite Falls Wolves, a divisional rival the team split with in four meetings last season. Brasher said the early schedule, which includes six of the team’s first nine games at Anchor Arena, gives the retooled blue line a chance to develop chemistry in front of a home crowd before a difficult road trip in the season’s second month.
The opener also arrives as the Frost’s lease with Anchor Arena Partners, the venue’s ownership group, approaches its scheduled renewal. Voss said conversations about a new long-term agreement are underway but not yet finalized, and that the team hopes to have more to share on that front before the season’s midpoint.
Beaumont, who has spent his entire professional career with the organization, said he has noticed a different energy inside the locker room heading into this season compared with year’s past. “Guys are talking about the second round like it’s the expectation, not a dream,” he said. “That’s new for this group. I like where our heads are at.”
Brasher said he is not setting a specific points target for the season, preferring to measure progress by how the team handles close games in its own zone, the area he said cost the Frost the most in last spring’s series loss. “If we’re a hard team to score against by January, I’ll feel good about where this group is heading,” he said. “Everything else tends to take care of itself when you defend well in this league.”
Voss said the front office also spent part of the offseason evaluating the goaltending tandem behind the new-look defense, ultimately deciding to bring back both goaltenders from last season rather than pursue a veteran addition. “We looked at what went wrong last spring and it wasn’t really a goaltending problem,” Voss said. “It was a problem of how much traffic and how many odd-man rushes our goaltenders were seeing. Fix that in front of them, and we think our goaltending was already good enough.”
Kellerman said he has spent extra time since arriving in Bellwater working with the team’s younger defensemen on positioning drills after practice, an informal mentorship Brasher said he encouraged but did not formally assign. “Anders didn’t need anybody to tell him to do that,” Brasher said. “That’s exactly the kind of veteran presence we were hoping to add when we signed him.”