Will have more from home, but in the meantime:
–Brent Thompson said Calvin de Haan and Joey Haddad will have their injuries evaluated at home. In the third, de Haan landed on his left arm as he tried to break up a play at the Providence blue line and wound up sliding in pain all the way behind the Providence goal line. Haddad went down sometime in the first; I didn’t see it. Upper-body, Thompson said; don’t think it’s head.
–Bridgeport objected to the tying goal because it thought Calle Ridderwall kicked the puck in.
–The shutout streak is at 8:03. That’s substantially behind the Cleveland Barons’ AHL record.
….
The more-as-promised:
They gave up a goal, after Kevin Poulin had gone 221:54, after the team had gone 224:06. It’s one of the more amazing things we may ever see around here, all things considered. Considering how up-and-down things had been before this started, considering it happened within a minute of Bridgeport’s own goal, maybe you wondered which way it was going to go from there.
. No big deal. Barely let the Bruins toward the net for most of the rest of the second period. They found a way to win, despite that they weren’t happy about a few calls/non-calls/kicked-in goals. In fact, if not for Anton Khudobin in the net opposite Poulin, they might have won by a wide margin. Again, no big deal; they kept coming.
“It was a great second period,” Poulin said. “This game, we were going for the win. (At) 1-1, we wanted to score more goals.”
They got one more, then went nuts in the shootout.
“I thought tonight was kind of a see-saw battle,” Brent Thompson said.
“We battled hard. … I’m happy with the way we continued to battle through.”
They ended up battling through the tying goal, which sure looked to have been kicked in. They put up a brief fight over it; Providence didn’t replay it in the arena. (Things had broken down a bit for Bridgeport responding to the rush, but still.) “That’s where video review might come into play someday,” Thompson said, though from what we’re told the system they’re testing at Bridgeport home games will only be used to see if a puck was in the net. “Unfortunately, we don’t have that. We had to find a way to win.”
And they did that with a shortened bench, using Benn Olson to fill in for Haddad up front, often going with four defensemen for long stretches after de Haan was injured, then spotting Olson in on defense when needed (and on the PK, a particular rarity, while Donovan was in the box). “We were defending hard,” Thompson said. And then he exempted the positioning on the second goal. But hey: kicked. Moving on.
…..
Moving on on a four-game winning streak for the first time since the run to the playoffs in March 2010. Didn’t even think it’d have been that long ago. They actually had a four-game road winning streak late last year, but they lost a few home games in between.
For player of the week… Let’s see, Romano had four points in four games. Ah, wait, Rakhshani, 3-3-6. Hey, Cizikas was 2-3-5 (got a six-game scoring streak). I don’t know. You got anybody else? (Seriously, no one scored, like, 15 goals in the Western Conference this week, did they? Start etching the crystal.)
Penalty kill is up to 26-for-26, including a four-on-three-turned-five-on-three that included some good blocked shots by Cizikas and de Haan, a few good saves and good work all around.
Romano said he found a loose puck that had hit Khudobin’s skate, gone across the crease and stuck in a pile of snow. “Nobody knew where it was.” He has four goals in six games now. “The big thing right now is I’m using my speed. I’m moving my feet away from the puck,” he said. The confidence builds on itself, and the chemistry works on the power play, too.
Probably particularly meaningless fact: Bridgeport had gone 15 games without playing overtime before tonight. That’s one short of the team record, early in 2005-06.
And RIP, Bob Davies (hat tip: Dave Stubbs).
Team’s off tomorrow, though news/notes are possible. If nothing else, chat Tuesday at 1:30.
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