Comeback Falls Short for Bears in 6-4 Loss to Phantoms

February 21, 2026

The Hershey Bears (22-20-6-2) managed to rally from a 4-1 deficit to tie the game at 4-4 in the second period, but ultimately fell by a 6-4 score Lehigh Valley Phantoms (23-22-2-2) in front of a sold-out crowd of 10,520 on Saturday night at GIANT Center.

The loss dropped the Bears' record against the Phantoms to 4-4-1-0, while extending Hershey's home winless streak to seven games (0-2-4-1).

BOX SCORE

NOTABLES:

• Hershey took a 1-0 lead 2:17 into the first period when Grant Cruikshank won a faceoff in the neutral zone back to Jon McDonald, who dumped the puck in, only to have it redirect off a stanchion between the glass and carom into an open net for McDonald's second of the season with Lehigh Valley Carson Bjarnason anticipating the play continuing behind the net.
• Lehigh Valley quickly answered less than two minutes later with a goal from Alex Bump at 4:13 to tie the score at 1-1. Bump made it 2-1 with a power-play goal at 10:01. Oliver Bonk then scored at 18:19 to put the Phantoms up by a pair of goals at the intermission.
• A collision 36 seconds into the second period forced Mitch Gibson from the game with an upper-body injury, resulting in Clay Stevenson taking over in net for his 100th career appearance with the Bears, taking over sole possession of 20th on the franchise list for goaltending appearances.
• Christian Kyrou then made it 4-1 for the visitors at 4:32.
• Henrik Rybinski scored a pair of goals at 5:34 and 6:15 of the second period to pull Hershey back to within a goal of the Phantoms, giving Rybinski only the second two-goal game of his career.
• Kaden Bohlsen made his Bears debut after being recalled the previous day, and netted his first AHL goal at 8:30 to tie the score at 4-4.
• The Phantoms re-established their lead with a strike by Alexis Gendron at 12:51, and Zayde Wisdom sealed the victory for Lehigh Valley with an empty-net goal at 18:15 to close out the scoring.

SHOTS: HER 33, LV 34

GOALTENDING: HER - Mitch Gibson, 10-for-13 & Clay Stevenson [L], 18-for-20; LV - Carson Bjarnason, 29-for-33

POWER PLAY: HER - 0-for-3; LV - 1-for-3

THEY SAID IT:

Bears head coach Derek King on what has been contributing to the recent string of losses:
"Well, it's just, it's mental, right? It's tired mistakes. It's not getting a puck out on the wall. Like, all we have to do is throw a puck up over the blue line or get a puck deep and it's not back in our end, and maybe we can get a change. But we fluff on the puck or it hits a shin pad, it goes back in our end, and now we're scrambling to recover. And then next thing you know, it's bang-bang, it's in the back of your net. These are things we can work on all we want in practice, but they know what to do."

King on the description of the team as "too dumb to quit," and how tonight's game may have qualified as an example of that mentality:
"Yeah, they kept coming, right? A lot of people are asking me about this too dumb to quit thing. It's not a knock on them being actually dumb, it's just they're relentless. They don't quit. It's just a saying I came up with. Just too dumb to quit. There's teams you can play over the course of the season and you get up 4-1 on them and they'll just lay down and the game's over, they don't have any pushback. We have pushback. It's not always pretty. Sometimes our results aren't the best. Like tonight - I thought we had a lot of pushback and we didn't quit. We kept going and going and going. We had opportunities that just weren't going in."

Kaden Bohlsen on scoring his first AHL goal and the equipment travel issues that threw into question whether he would be able to make his Hershey debut this evening:
"Got off the bench, saw [Matt Strome] kind of grinding down low, and he ended up making a really nice play out front to me. Happy it went in. It felt really good - been definitely working to get to this spot in my career. I had a flight from Charleston to Washington, and then Washington to here, and my gear got left in Washington, so I didn't get my gear until 3 o'clock today, and luckily my dad was flying in and got in around the same time the flight from Washington with my gear got in, so he was able to grab it and bring it to the rink, and we got it figured out from there."

(Answers edited for clarity)

The Bears continue the 2025-26 season, presented by Penn State Health, when they host the Utica Comets on Wednesday, Feb. 25 at 7 p.m. at GIANT Center for GIANT Foldable Grocery Tote Night and Berks Dollar Dog Night. The first 6,000 fans in attendance will receive a Bears foldable grocery tote, courtesy of The GIANT Company, while all fans can purchase $1 Berks hot dogs at select concourse locations. CLICK HERE to purchase tickets for this game.