Comeback Cubs

In each odd-numbered year spanning 1997 to 2003, two New England sports entities took turns showing a knack for surmounting a two-games-to-none deficit in a best-of-five playoff series. The Boston Red Sox pulled the relatively rare feat in 1999 and 2003 against the Cleveland Indians and Oakland Athletics, respectively. Only six Major League Baseballteams have done this in the first twenty-three years of the division series, and Boston is the only franchise to have produced two of those teams.

            But two-and-a-half years before the BoSox did it the first time, the Providence Bruins became only the sixth team in American Hockey League history to do the same. Two-and-a-half years before the Sox did it again, another edition of the P-Bruins became the eighth AHL team to pull such a rally. And in 2013, yet another score of Spoked-P skaters became the tenth.

            Maybe there was something in the airwaves of AM 630-WPRO, which in the nineties served as the P-Bruins’ broadcast abode and until the mid-aughts was Rhode Island’s chapter of the Red Sox radio network. If so, the potion may not work every time, but its effects have clearly lingered, as evidenced further by Boston’s historic climb from a 3-0 pothole in the 2004 American League Championship Series and a 3-1 quagmire in the 2007 ALCS. Ditto the P-Bruins’ winning back-to-back elimination games on the road to take a best-of-seven set from the 2007 Hartford Wolf Pack and the 2017 Hershey Bears.

            Fans of both franchises and of a certain age will recall the Pawtucket Red Sox and their comparable comeback after spilling the first two games of the 1984 International League Governor’s Cup Final at McCoy Stadium. The opposing Maine Guides had three chances to subsequently claim the title at home, but the persistent PawSox prevailed in five. Two years later, the parent club had also won three straight do-or-die contests to wrest the American League pennant from the California Angels in Game 7.

            But by 1997, nothing of that nature had happened in New England for more than a decade. And with or without historical inspiration, the fifth installment of the Providence Bruins offered no hope and heaped on the cause for angst when they finished fourth in the New England Division and met the first-place Worcester IceCats in the opening round. Worcester had finished twenty-five points ahead of Providence in the regular season, building that difference heavily on a lopsided season series.

Out of ten meetings, all of which ended in regulation, the IceCats had won eight, including six straight from December 15 through April 4. In the last installment of that streak, the host P-Bruins thrust a franchise-record sixty-six shots at Worcester goalie Travis Scott, who repelled sixty-four to backstop a 3-2 victory at the Civic Center.

            Even with a bounce back and bite back at the Worcester Centrum the next night, where late-season acquisition Derek Herlofsky backstopped a shutout and subsisted on Todd Elik’s goal for a 1-0 win (the Bruins’ first at the Centrum all season), Providence looked overmatched two weeks later. Two nights after hanging on to clinch the division four points ahead of the Springfield Falcons, and three nights before Game 1 of the New England Division Semifinals, the IceCats set a tone by taking a 4-3 victory from the Civic Center in the regular-season finale. (Ironically, it was the P-Bruins’ 3-1 win over second-place Springfield two days prior that secured the seeds and made the regular-season finale a playoff preview.)

            Games 1 and 2 at the Centrum and the Civic Center, respectively, followed an uncannily comparable pattern. The upset-minded Bruins raised a 2-0 upper hand each night, only to lose by identical 5-4 decisions. Neither the change of scenery from road to home nor a goaltending switch between Herlofsky and the veteran Scott Bailey had helped. So far, Worcester was making Providence the foil in a lesson on the adage that it is now how you start, but how you finish that matters.

            Game 2 took place on a Saturday, and the IceCats’ first potential clincher would not be until the following Wednesday. That merciful breather may or may not have halted the momentum, but it did allow the Bruins to recharge and prepare to bring the requisite sixty-minute supply of physical and mental energy. With it, they claimed their second dramatic win at the Centrum of the calendar month when blueliner Barry Richter broke a 2-2 tie and set the pace for a 4-2 triumph.

            Once again, the teams shuffled to Providence for the second half of a back-to-back set. The ensuing Game 4 would be another rollercoaster and ultimately became the Providence Civic Center’s first hockey game to require a fifth period since the PC Friars knocked off Boston College in the 1985 Hockey East championship. Just like on that occasion, the home Ocean State crowd delighted in the downfall of a favored Bay State visitor. Richter reloaded his clutch twig and scored in double-overtime, setting up a Saturday decider at the Centrum.

            Now the IceCats were in the P-Bruins’ company among teams facing elimination, and now they were the ones trying to stop the bleeding. And at two nights, the turnaround between Games 4 and 5 was only half as long as that between Games 2 and 3.

            With the Red Sox having finished their day’s work in the afternoon, both the New England Sports Network and WPRO were free to deliver the evening’s action. (This author, then a third grader at Melville Elementary School in Portsmouth, eagerly tuned into the telecast, hit the mute button and let Providence play-by-play man Dave Goucher describe what we were watching.)

With the momentum ostensibly on its side, the Providence faithful was free to dig up history-based omens, one of which was that this was the second anniversary of the P-Bruins’ only other playoff-series victory clincher. Two years to the day, on April 26, 1995, the Baby B’s had won Game 7 over the reigning Calder Cup champion Portland Pirates at the Cumberland County Civic Center in a 6-3 rout.

            This would be no rout, but it would be a more palatable version of the not-how-you-start-but-how-you-finish lesson on display a week prior. Landon Wilson — acquired by Boston from Colorado a week before Thanksgiving and reassigned after the parent club missed the playoffs — was denied credit for the dagger when he fed an empty net concomitant with the final second of regulation. But the case that it should have been a 4-2 final had no bearing, as Providence had pulled through all the same, 3-2, in both the game and the series.

            Wilson’s effort and ability to merely snuff Worcester’s last-ditch rally was impressive enough given that the Bruins had been killing a late penalty for too many men on the ice. In the postgame wrap, Goucher, a Pawtucket child of the seventies and eighties, admitted to developing “a sick feeling in my stomach” at the moment of that call. Odds are observers old enough or historically educated enough were recalling Boston’s fall-from-ahead falter in Game 7 of the 1979 Stanley Cup semifinals at the Montreal Forum. On that night, Bruins bench boss Don Cherry spilled a late 4-3 lead, and ultimately his job security, when the same too-many-men infraction invited the Canadiens to force overtime and then score a 5-4 sudden-death triumph over the franchise’s favorite playoff tinker toy.

            There would be no such breakdown for the Baby Bruins at the Worcester Centrum. And though his pupils lost the best-of-seven second round to second-place Springfield (who on April 27 had beat Portland to become the seventh AHL team to surmount a 2-0 deficit) in five games, bench boss Bob Francis was promoted rather than purged. He joined Pat Burns’ new coaching staff in Boston for the 1997-98 season. And within five years, he was the Jack Adams Award winner as NHL head coach of the year with the Phoenix Coyotes.

            As for crossover Bruins-Red Sox fans, those who followed both of WPRO’s radio tenants ought to have thought back to the 1997 Providence-IceCats saga when the Red Sox dropped the first two games of the 1999 American League Division Series. No comeback was guaranteed, but the faithful had proof it was possible, and that faith was rewarded when Boston ousted the Indians at Cleveland’s Jacobs Field in Game 5. In so doing, the Sox had solved a steadfast nemesis that had cut off their previous two playoff runs at the same stage in 1995 and 1998.

            Any subsequent expectation, or at least any subsequent hope, that a 2-0 deficit could turn into a 3-2 triumph started with the Providence Bruins. And it would recycle itself at its point of origin twice after the turn of the century.

 *****

            Francis’ legacy came up in conversation during the 2001 playoffs when Bill Armstrong, a player-turned-assistant-coach-turned-head-coach, spoke with the Providence Journal’s Bob Dick between that year’s New England Division semifinals and final. In reference to the interval between Games 2 and 3 of that 1997 Worcester series, the former defenseman and habitual scrapper Armstrong told Dick, “Bobby Francis was our coach then, and I remember he told us that we were one loss away from going out for the summer, so we should just go out and play.”

In his first year of serving in Francis’ old capacity, Armstrong would implicitly tell his Providence pupils the same thing to perk them up after a listless offensive turnout put them in a 2-0 pothole against the Hartford Wolf Pack in 2001.

            Game 2 happened to fall on both a Good Friday and a Friday the Thirteenth. Despite thirty-eight saves on forty shots by the veteran John Grahame, the visiting P-Bruins brooked all of the horror in Hartford. As penance for their dearth of offensive support for the Denver-born veteran goalie, they faced the task of turning an additional set of tables on the defending Calder Cup champions. Just as the Wolf Pack had done to them eleven months prior in the 2000 Eastern Conference final, they would need to win three straight games if they were going to be the ones denying a repeat title.

            Easter Eve at the Civic Center was the first call. It was April 14, a precise eleven months since Jeff Wells ended the Bruins’ last playoff game victory in double-overtime, 3-2, in Game 4 of the in the same matchup on the same Providence pond. Hartford had gone on to win that set in seven games. And on this night, the hosts belatedly picked up where they left off.

            Not unlike the night Barry Richter rose to the occasion in extra frames, a back-and-forth bout yielded a 4-4 regulation tie. Providence had not lost an overtime home game when facing elimination since the Springfield Falcons finished them off in 1996. But gleeful Wolf Pack fans were surely recalling the last time both of the teams had gone to sudden death in any location in any playoff situation. Providence-turned-Hartford blueliner Terry Virtue had completed his new friends’ comeback and ended his old allies’ title defense by pinballing the puck off of former Hartford forward Peter Ferraro’s skate and past Grahame in Game 7 of that 2000 conference final.

            New year, new setting, new pattern. Andre Savage ended the P-Bruins’ carryover five-game postseason losing skid to the Wolf Pack and sparked his team’s comeback at the 16:48 mark of the first overtime. And as if it were all a predestined twist and the hockey gods wanted emphasis, Savage converted when his shot was inadvertently directed past goaltender Johan Holmqvist by whom…?

            Savage’s former P-Bruins teammate Terry Virtue.

            The revitalized Providence Civic Center audience reconvened the next week to watch a 4-3 regulation squeaker. Eric Nickulas supplied two strikes and rookie Lee Goren, one year removed from helping North Dakota to an NCAA title in the same building, inserted the decider.

            The series shifted back to the Hartford Civic Center two nights later, and the heel-bound hosts were set back when Savage accepted a stab for the visitors. Rookie Wolf Pack defenseman Mike Mottau, one year removed from winning the Hobey Baker Award at national-finalist Boston College, incurred a five-minute spearing major.

For that infraction, his night was over, forcing Hartford to play on with one-sixth of its blue-line brigade missing. Moreover, the missing piece was the team’s most prolific two-way presence. Mottau had placed first among the team’s rearguards and fourth among all skaters with thirty-three assists and forty-three points in just sixty-one regular-season appearances. He had only missed the other nineteen because he was summoned to the parent New York Rangers for eighteen contests.

            But the Bruins, whose own parent club had joined the Blueshirts out of the playoff picture just like in 2000, still had all of their Boston-seasoned assets when they needed them. The fourth-year goaltender Grahame, who mustered only sixteen AHL contests in the regular season, faced thirty-seven shots in the first-round decider and halted thirty-six of them.

At the other end, fellow fourth-year pro Shawn Bates, who was coming off forty-five appearances in Boston that year, 133 overall and was now in his first playoff with Providence, watched Eric Manlow convert two of his setups. Manlow’s second strike with 10:24 to spare in regulation held up as the decider, and the P-Bruins joined the ageless Hershey Bears as the only other AHL franchise to turn a 2-0 deficit into a 3-2 victory in a best-of-five playoff round.

Compound that with the Providence Reds’ rally against the Cleveland Barons in 1952, and the Rhode Island capital was now the only city to see it happen on three occasions. (Side note: The old Barons, though rich in happy memories with nine Calder Cup championships, are the only franchise, and Cleveland the only city, to be on the losing end of such a reversal more than once, let alone three times.)

 *****

From 2004 to 2011, the AHL implemented a best-of-seven series in all four of its full-length Calder Cup playoff rounds. When it reverted to a best-of-five first round in 2012, the Bears and the Chicago Wolves both forced Game 5 after letting the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins and San Antonio Rampage, respectively, take the first two. But the Penguins and the Rampage each regrouped to win the decider.

The P-Bruins, meanwhile, missed that year’s playoffs, giving them three straight postseason no-shows. But the next season, while nowhere near the magic of the 1998-99 resurrection (more on that in the next chapter), they roared to a regular-season title. Under a new conference-based, one-through-eight bracket, they drew Hershey as their first-round assignment.

While there was a longer gap in between, the Hershey factor had shades of Hartford circa 2000-01. As of 2013, the Bears had terminated Providence’s previous playoff run in the 2009 Eastern Conference final, dropping the opener at home before winning four consecutive games to finish the job. When they nabbed a 2-0 edge in this first-round set, they had built a carryover head-to-head playoff win streak of six games, much like the Wolf Pack had built one of five games twelve years prior.

By 2013, per the laws of minor-league nature, the P-Bruins roster and coaching staff had no holdovers from 2001. The venue, though comprised of the same walls and standing on the same ground, was quite different as well. The Providence Civic Center finally bowed to the corporate bug in the summer of 2001, becoming the Dunkin Donuts Center. Later that decade, it finally installed a video board over center ice. Within center ice, the logo had even undergone a mild makeover, with the P and spokes trading colors.

But for the constants, namely the fans, the spring of 2013 brought familiar elements to a sea of eyes trained to reach for vital faith sustainers.  Then again, there was at least one key difference when these Baby B’s dropped the first two games, namely that they did so entirely at home. In turn, they would have to win back-to-back elimination games on the road.

And yes, a previous incarnation had done just that in 2007 against Hartford, but this was Hershey. By far the longest-tenured brand in the AHL, the Bears had also long succeeded the P-Bruins and the come-and-gone Philadelphia Phantoms as perennial league attendance leaders. Their fans showed up to the Giant Center and made uncompromising demands, which had recently brought the 2006, 2009 and 2010 Calder Cup title, plus an appearance in the 2007 final.

Then again, Game 2 took place on Sunday, April 28, and Game 3 would not be until Saturday, May 4. Like their 1997 ancestors, these Bruins had ample time to replenish their legs and program their minds for what lay ahead. They also had a key cog from all of Hershey’s last three Calder Cup runs in Chris Bourque, the eldest son of NHL Hall of Famer Ray Bourque.

Now in his father’s old organization, Bourque helped Providence retort early after his old employers struck first in Game 3. After Bobby Robins gave the visitors the lead, Bourque had a hand in the first two doses of insurance, deflating the audience of 10,076 (remarkably large for an early-round AHL playoff game) in a 5-1 romp.

            The next day, Hershey silenced the former 2010 Calder Cup playoff MVP and erased 2-0 and 3-2 deficits before taking its first lead at 4-3 with 4:40 to spare in the closing frame. That goal came via Tom Wilson, who was fresh out of the box along with Bourque after the latter embellished the former’s interference infraction, costing Providence a power play.

But after the Bears went to the bin alone on Nicolas Deschamps’ delay-of-game indiscretion, Bourque converted all of the negative energy on his side. He helped to set up Craig Cunningham’s conversion, then did the same for Carter Camper to nab a permanent 5-4 lead with sixty-four seconds remaining.

The reward was the P-Bruins’ first rubber game in a postseason series to take place on home ice. (Their two previous Game 5s in best-of-five sets and all four of their Game 7s had occurred in other New England cities.) With a respectable audience of 4,175 on hand for a Wednesday night in early May, the contesting clubs took turns bouncing back from a one-goal deficit. Casey Wellman struck for the visitors with seventy-nine seconds gone, only to watch Justin Florek put the hosts on the board at 5:04 of the first period. Jordan Caron’s second-period goal held up as the difference through the second intermission, but the Bruins’ edge evaporated at the hands of Joey Crabb at 3:56 of the third.

Finally, veteran forward Jamie Tardif gave Providence a permanent 3-2 lead with 10:40 left in regulation. AHL goaltender of the year Niklas Svedberg kept his door shut thereafter, including for the last thirty-two seconds, as the B’s warded off a Hershey power play.

With shades of 1997 (namely killing the last-minute penalty, plus the identical 3-2 clinching game and series scores) and 2001 (eliminating that team that eliminated the P-Bruins from their last playoff), the second sequel of the comeback cubs was complete. And as of the 2017 offseason, only eleven AHL teams have triumphed after trailing by two in a best-of-five series. Of those eleven, the P-Bruins still own an unmatched three of those moments. The Bears are stuck on two, while the Rochester Americans have yet to pull one off in their first sixty-one years.