Alex Bump’s inner circle and inner belief have fueled his fast rise with the Flyers

PITTSBURGH — A little over two weeks ago, Alex Bump stood in Chickie’s & Pete’s in Malvern after appearing on the Snow The Goalie podcast and said that, while disappointed that he didn’t break camp with the Flyers in October, he knew his chance was “going to come.”

On that cold Wednesday night, 31 miles west of Xfinity Mobile Arena, Bump piled into a car with fellow Flyers prospect Devin Kaplan and headed back to Allentown to work on his game and make the necessary adjustments to reach hockey’s highest level.

Well, sometimes life moves pretty fast.

“I was actually sleeping,” Bump said when asked on Saturday how he found out he was being called up to the Flyers. “Woke up to probably six missed phone calls from Alyn [McCauley, a Flyers assistant general manager] and, obviously, it was just ‘Give me a call back ASAP.’”

» READ MORE: Alex Bump scores in NHL debut as Flyers down the Pittsburgh Penguins in a shootout

Bump also needed Hunter McDonald, a defenseman for Lehigh Valley of the American Hockey League, to wake him up. Maybe he needed him to pinch him, too, because he had about an hour drive south in a car service and a plane to catch.

On Saturday, Bump not only made his NHL debut against the Pittsburgh Penguins but also “just closed my eyes and shot” for his first NHL goal.

“I was most nervous for the rookie lap, to be honest,” he said. “But once I started playing hockey, it’s just another hockey game.”

It was. But, it wasn’t.

The PPG Paints Arena crowd was pretty quiet when Bump scored his goal, a short-side snipe past Penguins goalie Stuart Skinner, except for a roar that came from down below and to the left of the press box.

It wasn’t hard to figure out where the celebration came from.

“Oh, geez. I think I saw them right away,” Bump said with a chuckle. “You couldn’t miss them, big orange glob in the middle of the black stands.”

Sitting in Section 117 behind the net that the Flyers shot on twice, with some other members of the “Official Bump Hype Crew” — which was emblazoned on the front of their bright orange long-sleeve T-shirts — were his parents, Cheryl Kerek and Rick Bump, his brothers, Connor and Tyler, sister Hannah, and aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends. More than 20 people made the long trip to watch Alex live his dream.

“I showed up tonight, just hoping that he didn’t look out of place. I think he looks pretty good tonight, but scoring his goal was,” his father paused to not get emotional, “you kind of sit back and relax, and ‘OK, you’ve done it.’”

As fans in orange and black — and black and gold, too — congratulated members of the hype crew, Cheryl added, “I don’t know how you can make it any better. The whole family’s here. It’s a beautiful night.”

Bump is a rink rat.

Growing up in Prior Lake, Minn., he was always the one on the driveway in his rollerblades until it snowed. “If he’s bored, ‘I’m going to the rink and shooting pucks, Mom,’” Cheryl recalled him saying. The youngest of the four Bump kids, who all played hockey, he was always excited to get to the rink, even for practice.

“He absolutely loves hockey,” Prior Lake High School coach Joe Pankratz told The Inquirer last year. “You can’t get him off the ice.”

Watching Alex Bump, you would not have thought the 22-year-old was playing his first NHL game.

Skating on the Flyers’ top line with Christian Dvorak and Nikita Grebenkin, across more than 16 minutes of action — including an overtime shift and power-play time — he controlled the boards, deked away from the opposition, made smart, heads-up passes, and was consistently around the net.

A criticism of Bump last season was that he would get knocked off pucks; that was not the case on Saturday as he kept defenders at bay. The winger said he added 15 pounds of muscle to what was listed as a 6-foot-1, 200-pound frame in the spring when he made his pro debut for the Phantoms, and it showed.

The puck seemed to find him all night, and, according to Natural Stat Trick, he led the team in individual shot attempts (seven), with two being scoring chances. As coach Rick Tocchet said, he showed “a lot of confidence.”

And to be honest, that’s just who Bump is.

“Alex does not lack for confidence,” Western Michigan coach Pat Ferschweiler said at last year’s Frozen Four. “He’s got inner belief, because he works really hard, and that’s how belief is earned. He does that every day. So he’s not a cocky kid, but he does have self-belief, which I think there’s a fine line there and he walks on the right side of it.”

» READ MORE: Flyers prospect Alex Bump became a star at Western Michigan. The former fifth-rounder might prove to be ‘an absolute steal.’

Danny Brière was an adviser to then-GM Chuck Fletcher at the 2022 NHL draft. He joked last year that his nephew Zaac, the team’s runner at the Montreal draft, “still claims he made the pick for us” after seeing Bump’s name high on the team’s draft board and saying they should take him.

Philly took Bump, the 2022 USA Today High School Hockey Player of the Year, in the fifth round.

“He came up to the suite after … and he was [ticked] off that he went so late. He felt he should have went earlier in the draft,” Flyers director of player development Riley Armstrong, then an assistant coach with Lehigh Valley, told The Inquirer last spring.

It lit a fire in the kid who will say, to this day, he’s not a fifth-rounder. “I think he’s proven a lot of people wrong, or for our sake, right,” Armstrong said.

That’s all he has done. He opened eyes across college hockey last season with 23 goals and 47 points in 42 games, capping it off with a stellar performance — even if he didn’t light up the scoresheet — at the 2024 Frozen Four. He led Western Michigan, also the alma mater of Flyers president Keith Jones, who also wore No. 20 for the Flyers, to its first national championship.

» READ MORE: Grading Danny Brière’s trade deadline moves and decision to hold onto Rasmus Ristolainen

So it was a bit shocking when, after impressive showings in July and September at development and rookie camps, respectively, he didn’t make the Flyers.

“Definitely, just kind of some nerves,” he said recently when asked what went wrong. “I think it was just kind of my first training camp, and I didn’t really know what to expect. But I think I got better as it went on. … It doesn’t really define me, who I am as a player.”

Bump was loaned to Lehigh Valley on Sept. 30 and struggled to get things going. The goal scorer, who loves the pull-and-shoot and driving to the middle of the ice, started slow, with one goal in his first eight games.

It was a heart-to-heart chat after the fifth game of the season with Phantoms coach John Snowden, when he was challenged to step up his game, battle, and win 50-50 pucks on the wall, that helped turn the tide.

“The following game, if I remember correctly, was against Hershey, and some of the advice, you could see him put into practice,” McCauley told The Inquirer this week. “ … Alex is a good-sized guy, like, use your body, get more involved; this will help you win more pucks and create more space for yourself. If you simply just bump into the guy and then push off that check, now you’ll create space for yourself. But if you’re just kind of reaching and allow that guy to close on you, tie up your stick or whatever, but engage your body, use that to shield the puck from the opposition.

“And there was a play where he got in on the forecheck, he bumped the guy, created a turnover, it led to a chance — did not lead to a goal — but I was like, that’s proper process. And I love the fact that what he was instructed to do or the advice that he was given, he put into practice right away, and also saw, to some extent, the fruits of that labor, or could see how this is going to benefit him."

Bump was surging — thanks in part to playing with his roommate Denver Barkey, on the Phantoms’ top line — but then suffered an upper-body injury that kept him to one game between Dec. 19 and Feb. 14. He came back, and while he didn’t score in the first two back, he had four goals in the six games before his call-up.

“I think before he got hurt, his game was really turning,” Snowden told The Inquirer last week. “He was doing all those little things: consistently playing through guys, winning 50-50 battles, getting inside of contact early to create some space offensively, attacking the interior of the rink, being at the net front more rather than hanging out in the high ice waiting for pucks to get passed to him so he could shoot it.

“He was going to the net more, and his production started to climb.”

And that production has continued to climb as the young forward not only earned a call-up to the NHL but also opened eyes with his play — and in his short-side snipe, despite him saying that he felt he bobbled the pass from Grebenkin.

» READ MORE: Acquiring David Jiříček is the latest example of the Flyers’ unorthodox approach to rebuilding. It’s worth the risk.

The youth movement has finally arrived in Philly, and the Flyers assuredly need a game-breaker. Well, that’s a good start for Bump: One game. One goal.

Not bad for a fifth-round pick.

“I think at the draft, I maybe fell a little bit, and that kind of put a chip on my shoulder, but I don’t think it really changed anything. I’ve always kind of had that competitive drive, and I’ve always had that belief in myself that I was going to make it,” he said on Sunday, sitting in a stall with his nameplate above it in the Flyers locker room in Voorhees.

“I think you just have a belief in yourself, I think that’s the biggest factor.”