Leier-O'Neill Feud Adding Fuel To The Fire Between Phantoms & Penguins
ALLENTOWN, PA -- After a game in late October - a Lehigh Valley Phantoms' 5-1 road win over rival Wilkes-Barre/Scranton - Taylor Leier seemed genuinely surprised that his former teammate turned foe Will O'Neill had clipped him and started a fight in the waning moments of the game.
O'Neill was later suspended under league rules for insitgating a fight in the final five minutes of a game, and at the time seemed like just a one-off frustration kind of play from the former Phantoms defender who definitely did not leave the organization on good terms.
Back Story - What Went Wrong For O'Neill WIth Phantoms
Last year, after a season-long grudge with then-head coach Scott Gordon saw O'Neill sitting in the press box as a healthy scratch for most of the stretch run and the entire 2018 postseason, the player - after being called "a f---ing idiot" by Gordon at a practice late last season and having a puck fired at him by the coach, had enough of his coach's antics.
O'Neill dropped his gloves and tried to fight the Phantoms' head coach at that practice on May 16th, after a season's worth of bad blood had finally boiled over. O'Neill knew he had no chance of playing in Gordon's lineup and that he wasn't re-sigining with the organization.
It shouldn't come as a surprise then that O'Neill had an extra chip on his shoulder playing against his former team, but going after Taylor Leier seemed like an isolated, in-the-moment kind of thing.
The two were teammates two seasons ago in Lehigh Valley (Leier spent 2017-18 in the NHL with the Flyers) and Leier explained back in October that the two were close during his time on the team two years ago. They'd watch hockey games together at each other's apartment and those kinds of things.
Round Two - December 15th, 2018
Fast forward to the next meeting between the Phantoms and Penguins - nearly two months after O'Neill and Leier's tangle on October 20th - and a big scrum away from the play late in the second period of December 15th's game saw the two join the fracas.
Round Two, if you will.
"Dude, I know. Everyone's asking me the same thing," Leier told Inside AHL Hockey after a Phantoms' 6-1 win in Hershey over the weekend. "I have no idea. I don't know what's going on. A lot of people were joking that there was going to be a round 2, and there somehow was. I wasn't planning on it. I don't know, maybe he was planning on it. I have no idea."
The scrum on December 15th started with Sam Lafferty and T.J. Brennan getting into it away from the play. Mark Friedman entered the scrum and shoved Lafferty off his defense partner and the remaining players on the ice all joined the pile up shortly after.
O'Neill told Penguins' reporter Tom Venesky after the team's practice last Thursday that there was "no ill will or disrespect" towards Leier.
"At the time of the game I wasn't sure that was going to happen," O'Neill told Venesky. "Grab someone and take them aside so it's not a two on one somewhere. It just so happened he turned and looked at me like he wanted to go again. It was a way to get the crowd excited in a heated matchup. I went in there not thinking there was going to be a fight, there was a fight. It was emotional."
Here's Leier's take on the same scrum from the December 15th game.
"Yeah, I saw one of our guys get jumped and they had four guys to our two. We just so happened to grab each other, and there was adrenaline and all that stuff. I think we just looked at each other, and I'm like do you wanna go and then we went."
That's hockey.
The two dropped the gloves and while it initially was a wrestling match to the ground, O'Neill got the upper hand - pinning Leier to the ice and unloading punches on the Phantoms' forward while he was on his stomach and defenseless.
"There's nothing wrong with it. He didn't cheap shot me or anything," Leier rather modestly explained. "The stuff at the end - I think you can leave that stuff out of the game but I'm not upset or anything. I didn't get hurt. I don't think it bothered me as much as it did other people. I have no grudge over him."
The American Hockey League's (AHL) break for the holidays ends the day after Christmas, and the Phantoms will be right back at it on December 26th - and back at the scene of the "crime" with a Wednesday night matchup between the Phantoms and Penguins.
So, Round Three?
"Me and Will, I thought we had a good relationship when he was on our team," Leier said. "Stuff happens. I'll never be one to cheap shot somebody, so you won't see that. It'll be a hard-fought game on Wednesday."
