Providence County product Clark Donatelli
represented more than his native locality as a member of the inaugural
Providence Bruins team. His attitude toward his arrangement that year evolved
in almost synchronized fashion with the team’s on-ice fortunes.
It took the newfangled Baby B’s five
games and their first exposure to their new home crowd to snap out of a funk
and establish their eventual North Division-winning rhythm. Likewise, it took
time and coaxing for Donatelli to warm up to a disappointing demotion from
Boston out of training camp. His AWOL status at what should have been his first
AHL practice that year was NBC-10 sports anchor Frank Carpano’s lead bulletin
on his portion of the September 30 evening newscast.
Donatelli had been drafted by the
New York Rangers out of high school, played three seasons at Boston University,
then gone to the 1988 U.S. Olympic team before his rights were transferred to
the Minnesota North Stars. After twenty-five appearances in The Show with that
organization, then a full season with the IHL’s San Diego Gulls, he came closer
to home on a pact with the Bruins. He would dress for ten games with Boston in
1991-92 while spending the rest of the campaign on another Olympic odyssey.
Real-deal hometown factor aside, it
was plain that he preferred not to look back from that the following fall.
However, Donatelli came around and went on to play fifty-seven games and score
twenty-six points for the P-Bruins. Based on that output, he underperformed on
the ice, and he would never see another shift of action in the big league. But
the way he warmed up to the area that fostered him as a boy manifested itself
when he won the P-Bruins’ first community service award at season’s end.
After three seasons in the IHL,
Donatelli retired, but eventually resurfaced as an assistant coach for Providence
College under Tim Army. When that staff was broken up in 2011, he used that homecoming
career-changing gig as a springboard to the minor-league ranks, assisting and
eventually replacing Stan Drulia as the ECHL’s Wheeling Nailers bench boss.
Four years at that job yielded a promotion to the AHL’s Wilkes-Barre/Scranton
Penguins, who collided with none other than the Bruins in the 2016 and 2017
postseasons.
In all, thirteen Rhode Island natives, nineteen
Providence College alumni and seven Brown University products have played at
least one game for the P-Bruins. Five of them fall under a combination of those
categories, including the East Greenwich-born Steve King, who stood out as a
Brown Bear and went on to temporarily interrupt his retirement to pump in a
handful of clutch goals for the Bruins en route to the 1999 Calder Cup.
King came Brown at a nadir in the
program’s history in 1987-88. His ten goals as a freshman were good for the
team lead in a 3-22-1 campaign. Head coach Herb Hammond subsequently gave way
to Bob Gaudet, whose growing pains amounted to a 1-25-0 record in 1988-89. But
as an upperclassman, King spearheaded Brown’s return to relevance. The team
cracked double digits in the win column, and his hat trick in an ECAC playoff
tilt with Vermont gave the Bears their first playoff triumph since 1980. An
ornate senior year gave way to seven seasons in the NHL and minor leagues
before injuries appeared to derail his dreams.
King, who has long since settled back into
East Greenwich, got one more shot at a little pro hockey glory when the
P-Bruins tabbed him for the 1999 homestretch and playoffs. He had a remarkable
track record for versatile postseason productivity, having charged up eighteen
goals and seventeen assists for thirty-five points in forty-four Calder and
Turner Cup games over five tournaments. By matching his previous career high of
seven playoff strikes, he tied three others for third on a deep Providence team
and, maybe more critically, gave the forwards an extra veteran presence and clutch
aptitude.
Shortly after the victory lap at the Civic
Center, King would return to his old haunts at Meehan Auditorium, where he
spent two seasons on Brown’s coaching staff. Ten years after winning the Cup,
he had another moment of glory in the area, namely enshrinement in his alma mater’s
athletic hall of fame.
Five years before King came back for a
last home hurrah, Cranston’s Dave Capuano did the same. The University of Maine
alumnus had played for four NHL and four minor-league teams in as many years
before joining the Baby B’s in 1993-94. In only fifty-one appearances, he tied
Grigori Panteleev for third on the team with twenty-four goals and added
twenty-nine helpers. His most impressive individual effort came on January 18,
when he scored four goals, including a second-period hat trick, in a 7-2 rout
of the host Saint John Flames. That made the second installment of a three-game
sweep through the Maritimes, a rare high point in an otherwise disappointing
campaign for the Bruins.
When the team closed up shop on the season
upon missing the playoffs, Capuano closed out his career at the age of
twenty-five. With that said, he went out on the heels of his most productive
campaign, and he had done it for his home-state squad. No one else born in the
state has had a more prolific stint for the Spoked-Ps so far.
Other locals who have played for the
P-Bruins started leaving their mark on the franchise even before they (or, in
some cases, anyone else) could start making things happen on the ice. Upon its
1992 arrival, the team wisely involved its younger demographic of new fans in a
contest to decide the name of its new mascot. A 12-year-old West Warwick
resident by the name of Drew Omicioli submitted the eventual winner, “Sam
Boni.” Ten years later, on the heels of his senior season at Providence
College, Omicioli suited up for six games on an amateur tryout with the
P-Bruins. In so doing, he achieved a common thread with his older brother,
Mike, who had graduated in 1999 and then returned to the 401 area code play
sixteen games under Bill Armstrong in 2001.
Those six contests would be all the action
the younger Omicioli saw at that level, but he chipped in two meaningful goals
while he was there to help the team reach the preliminary round of the
playoffs.
Other local P-Bruins in the making had
special memories of savoring the franchise’s landmark victory as kids. North Providence native Cody Wild was five years old when the team came into being,
then celebrated his twelfth birthday on the day of Game 1 of the 1999 Calder
Cup Final. Barely a week later, with his mother’s blessing, he skipped school
to attend the championship parade downtown.
Wild went on to attend La Salle Academy
(Lou Lamierillo’s alma mater) and played two years for the Boston Junior Bruins
of the Eastern Junior league before enrolling at PC. Between his established
familiarity with local fans and his rugged style of defense, Wild became a
Friars fan favorite. Drafted by Edmonton after his freshman year, he tied
fellow blueliner Matt Taormina for the team lead with eighteen assists as a
junior in 2007-08.
After that, he sacrificed his senior year
and promptly joined the Oilers’ AHL affiliate in Springfield, tallying his
first professional point in a visit to the P-Bruins. Two years later, Boston
acquired his rights shortly before the trade deadline, and he logged eighteen
appearances down the stretch, plus seven more in 2010-11 before going to the
Penguins organization.
Another Friar-turned-Bruin with
Rhode Island roots has since lived a much longer and glamorous narrative in
both the NCAA and professional ranks. As a PC junior in 2014-15, Johnston
native and two-way connoisseur Noel Acciari led his team with fifteen goals and
a plus-22 rating. His physical and efficient style earned him Hockey East’s
defensive forward of the year award, and represented the balance PC needed to
contend for an at-large NCAA tournament bid.
The lowest-seeded team in the bracket, the
Friars capitalized on a default home-ice advantage by upsetting Miami and
Denver in the East Regional at the Dunkin Donuts Center. With the resultant
ticket to the Frozen Four in Boston, they ousted Omaha, 3-1, then shocked the
de facto home team from Boston University, 4-3, to claim the school’s first
national championship.
In his four collegiate appearances
at the Bruins’ AHL and NHL mansions, Acciari accumulated three goals and two
assists. The following summer, his hometown organization inked him to a two-year
free-agent pact, and he split the next two years between the two buildings as
an employee. Upon dressing for the Baby B’s home opener against
Wilkes-Barre/Scranton, he had skated at The Dunk as a youth, a collegian and a
professional.
The following February, in an interview with WPRI television’s Mark Dordero, Acciari remarked, “It’s
definitely really unique that a local guy can make it from starting, when
you’re little, playing here in the intermission and then going to Providence
College, then coming here…it’s just been an unbelievable ride and I can’t be
happier for what I’ve gone through and what I’m gonna go through, and having a
blast right now, and I’m just gonna continue doing what I do.”
In the three weeks that followed
that interview, Acciari tallied a goal and five assists in seven games, then
answered his first NHL call-up on March 1, 2016. He dressed against the
visiting Calgary Flames that night, threw two hits, landed one shot on net and
won four of seven faceoffs. He would stick for eighteen more games, then return
to Providence for the playoffs.
Through his first two professional
campaigns, Acciari has played seventy-five games for the Spoked-Ps and
forty-eight for the Spoked-Bs, plus eight Calder Cup and four Stanley Cup
playoff outings. In late June of 2017, he renewed his black-and-gold contract
for another two seasons.
No other born-and-raised Ocean Stater has
dressed for the local AHL franchise more times. Only Jeff Jillson (fifty games)
and Bryan Berard (eighty) have made more appearances with Boston. With the
potential for his first full NHL campaign, Acciari could easily eclipse them
both in 2017-18.
*****
Noteworthy natural-born Rhode Islanders
who had shorter and less eventful stints with the P-Bruins have included
Jillson and 1990 Hobey Baker Award winner Dave Emma. Jillson, a defenseman from
North Smithfield and member of Mount St. Charles Academy’s incredible state
championship dynasty, came in 2002-03 through a midseason trade between Boston
and San Jose. He tallied fifteen points in thirty appearances, made the parent
club out of training camp in the fall of 2003 and was ultimately dealt again before
the end of that season. The Boston College-educated Emma logged ten goals and
twenty-eight points for his hometown AHL squad in 1996-97.
One local native is featured in the
Internet Hockey Database solely because of his momentary participation with the
P-Bruins. West Warwick’s Rob Gribbin, a longtime Providence firefighter and
former goaltender at Bishop Hendricken High School, was twenty-five years of
age during the inaugural season. When injuries in Boston created a domino effect down the depth chart, the Baby B’s plugged the void by signing Gribbin
to an amateur tryout. The next night, he would see eight minutes of relief
action and stop both of the two shots he faced, though a lack of offensive
support led to a no-decision in a 7-3 loss to Adirondack.
Seven years later, amidst the
record-setting seventy-player season, Gribbin was the seventy-first player to
suit up for the 1999-00 team. He would not count toward the season’s recorded
roster, though, as his services were never summoned. He waited on standby in
case David Brumby was scorched, though Brumby held his own to claim the 2-1
overtime win over Hartford.
As a result, Gribbin retained his perfect
career save percentage and did not scrape the blue paint at the Civic Center
until long after it rebranded as The Dunk. He had the privilege of backstopping
the makeshift Providence Bruins alumni team in its November 14, 2011 scrimmage
against the Boston Bruins alumni.
Among the naturalized Rhode
Islanders who came to the P-Bruins with established name recognition through
their college careers, only one Brown Bear has played the majority of a season
at The Dunk. Scott Ford, a British Columbia native who claimed his Ivy League
degree in 2004, came back for forty-four games in 2005-06. The stay-at-home
blueliner retained a plus-nine rating while chipping in seven points.
Four out-of-state Friars — Jeff
Serowik, Joe Hulbig, Jay Leach and Kyle MacKinnon — have gone from shining at
Schneider Arena to sticking around La Salle Square for a year, the equivalent
or more. Another PC graduate, John Ferguson, Jr., was assigned to be the
P-Bruins general manager in 2016, two years after joining Boston’s front
office.
The journeyman Serowik came back to
the Divine City four years after graduating from PC, spending one year with the
Bruins in 1994-95. Among other distinctions, the Manchester, New Hampshire
native quickly emerged as a tormentor for the newfangled Worcester IceCats,
tallying three multi-goal games at their expense alone. He would ultimately set
an AHL single-season record for defensemen by logging twenty-eight goals. With
thirty-four helpers, he finished with a career high of sixty-two points, which
he never matched in four more years of playing. In the postseason, he tied
Peter Laviolette for the Bruins lead among blueliners with ten points.
Serowik’s one-year wonder of pro
hockey in Providence, his final season in the AHL, also yielded a one-game
call-up to Boston after the lockout and the Eddie Shore Award as the minor
league’s top defenseman. He thus became the first P-Bruin to win an individual
league trophy. After subsequent stops in three IHL cities in as many seasons,
he mustered twenty-six appearances with the Pittsburgh Penguins in 1998-99
before retiring. He has since returned to New England, where he runs the
popular Pro Ambitions hockey camp series.
The year after Serowik played his
last game for a Rhode Island team, Hulbig helped the Friars to a stunning 1996
Hockey East championship victory as a senior. Edmonton’s first-round draft
choice from 1992 proceeded to split his first three professional seasons
between the Oilers and Hamilton Bulldogs. On Hamilton’s visit to the Civic
Center on December 18, 1998, his late-regulation equalizer keyed the eventual
ending of one of the P-Bruins’ many hot streaks. After Hulbig drew a 2-2 knot,
teammate Jeff Daw scored in the ensuing overtime, preventing Providence from
attaining a tenth consecutive home victory.
A transfer to the Bruins system in the
summer of 1999 brought Hulbig on board for the start of Providence’s Calder Cup
title defense. He chipped in nine points over fifteen appearances, then
answered a call for reinforcement in Boston, where he mustered twenty-four
appearances before nagging injuries ended his season in January. Hulbig would
split two more seasons between the two B’s, and even served as team captain for
a portion of 2001-02. He eventually went to Worcester late that season, then
finished his playing days with Albany.
With the 1996 Hockey East pennant, PC
earned an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament. It would not return there until
2001, when senior captain Jay Leach piloted the Friars to at-large
qualification. Five seasons later, Leach was wearing the “C” for the Spoked-Ps,
making him the only man to have served as a captain for both a collegiate and
professional hockey program in Providence. His three-year playing stint with
the Bruins (2004-2007) gave way to six more years with five other
organizations, after which he parlayed his leadership qualities into a coaching
career.
Leach spent 2015-16 on the
Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins coaching staff, serving under Mike Sullivan and
Clark Donatelli, and holding the head position for a three-game interim
himself. The next year, he was back in Providence, joining Trent Whitfield on
the staff of Kevin Dean. With his time as an assistant, which has since given
way to a promotion as the Baby B’s next head coach, he had fellow
Friar-turned-Bruin Noel Acciari as one of his AHL students.
Acciari’s arrival at PC, opposite coach
Nate Leaman, came with the advent of a program revitalization that McKinnon
barely missed out on. But when he had spare time amidst his first two AHL
seasons, the senior captain of the 2010-11 Friars could catch an in-person glimpse
of the turnaround.
The undrafted MacKinnon had broken out as
a junior for Tim Army and company, finishing 2009-10 with a team-best twelve
goals and twenty-five points. The next year, he stamped a career-high fourteen
strikes, but the Friars finished out of the Hockey East playoff picture for the
third consecutive season.
As is customary, many of McKinnon’s fellow
seniors promptly signed amateur tryout deals with various AHL and ECHL teams.
He would get his own extension on the 2010-11 season without having to cut
classes, as he spent the balance of March practicing with the P-Bruins. He then
debuted in an April 1 contest against Connecticut, during which he hit grizzled
defenseman Wade Redden in the far corner of the attacking zone and popped a
pane of glass out of position in the process.
Four more AHL games and three points
later, MacKinnon inked a full-time minor-league pact with the Bruins. He
returned to The Dunk in September to participate in Boston’s intrasquad
scrimmage, then placed fifth on the Providence leaderboard with fourteen goals
in another playoff no-show. Amidst the subsequent surge to the top of the AHL
standings in 2012-13, he chipped in twenty-eight regular-season points and
dressed for all twelve postseason games. MacKinnon then transferred to the St.
John’s IceCaps and has more recently gone back to his native California via the
San Diego Gulls.
His final Providence Bruins totals: 142
games, twenty-eight goals and twenty-four assists.
Besides the elected officials and
businesspeople who made the team’s existence possible, other off-ice figures
keyed the construction of the bridge between the P-Bruins and their new
locality. In one exceptional case, the rewards they reaped reflected the
peerless flocks of fans all the more. In two of the team’s first three seasons,
WPRO color analyst John Colletto won the radio edition of the AHL’s James H.
Ellery Memorial Award for media excellence.
A Massachusetts transplant who started inAttleboro opposite future WBZ reporter Tom Cuddy, Colletto acquired the
nickname “Coach” by making sports talk his niche. A veteran of the city and
station for a decade by the time pro hockey returned, he complemented Joe
Beninati (who had moved with the Mariners from Maine), Bob Crawford and
Pawtucket’s own Dave Goucher to form the P-Bruins broadcast tandem for the
better part of the nineties.
Colletto subsequently spearheaded the
founding of Rhode Island’s first all-sports radio station, 790 The Score. The
enterprise did not last, and he ultimately abandoned the field, but later
earned enshrinement in the Rhode Island Radio Hall of Fame in 2013.
With Goucher’s arrival as Colletto’s third
play-by-play counterpart in 1995, local listeners would ultimately get five
years of descriptive and passionate, yet down-to-earth and businesslike
broadcasting from one of their own. Goucher had interned with the state’s other
Triple-A sports team, his hometown PawSox, while in high school. He was a
student-sportscaster calling the Boston University men’s hockey team by the
time the P-Bruins arrived, and he took in a game at the Civic Center during Christmas break his senior year. Upon graduation, he went to the ECHL’s
Wheeling Thunderbirds for what would be his only two years of living away from
New England.
Rhode Island roots, along with lifelong
hockey and Bruins fanaticism, undoubtedly bolstered young Goucher’s candidacy
when the seasoned Crawford followed the path of the old Reds from Providence to
Binghamton. As one of his former listeners around the 401 area code, this author
can attest to the way he combined his passion for the game, organization and
state with his journalistic prowess to endear himself to the equally fervent,
attentive and knowledgeable P-Bruins fan base. Of particular note was the stark
contrast in tone when he called a Providence goal, as opposed to an enemy
tally. In addition, he omitted no details in setting the scene for the opening
faceoff and sprinkled in a few solid metaphors, all of which helped to give the
audience a decent sense that they were at the game themselves.
With those propensities, Goucher was there
to describe the worst and the best of the P-Bruins on-ice narratives in 1997-98
and 1998-99. When NESN was present at the Civic Center, he occasionally
branched out for pregame sideline reports, in-game visits to Tom Caron and Bob
Norton’s booth and pre-taped features that ran during intermission. All of this
would help to bring a hefty helping of home-state pride in the summer of 2000,
as Goucher beat out a reported pool of fifty-five applicants to become the next
Boston Bruins announcer at WBZ.
Per the Boston Globe’s Jim Greenridge, the station’s general manager, Ted
Jordan, said at the time, “When we got down to the three finalists, we liked
Dave’s delivery, plus he knew the organization and he’s had a relationship with
Bob Beers before, having announced his games in the playoffs the last two
seasons.”
Though Corey Masse, a hungry young New
England outsider, came in and competently replaced Goucher for what would be a
six-year run, the Boston network’s gain was plainly the Providence station’s
loss. And perhaps fittingly, Goucher’s new gig coincided with Peter
Laviolette’s promotion from the P-Bruins head-coaching slot to that of a Boston
assistant. The two men who at that time had been involved in more Providence
games than any other announcer, player or coach (head or assistant) got their
NHL breaks simultaneously.
Then again, it was hardly a loss for
listeners back in the Ocean State. All they needed to do was dial their radios
to another AM frequency. And now they could share the wealth with the rest of
the region, which they did for seventeen years until Goucher sought a new challenge as the first TV announcer for the NHL's expansion Vegas Golden Knights.
Within a year of Goucher’s departure,
another Rhode Islander found employment at the building then-newly rechristened
the Dunkin Donuts Center. The enlistment of Ben Schwartz as the Providence
Bruins organist was an icebreaker not only because his childhood overlapped
with the P-Bruins, but because his upbringing was still in progress when he
took the job. From the ages of thirteen through nineteen, he held the official
title of organist and music director. For his final two-plus seasons, which
overlapped with his first two years of studying at Brown University, his duties
broadened to cover the canned music as well as the keyboard.
In a comment thread on his own YouTubechannel, Schwartz notes that he has drawn inspiration from TD Garden organist
Ron Poster, who has along lent Rene Rancourt the distinctive musical
accompaniment on his national anthems. He also has his own renditions of the
Boston Bruins old theme song, “Paree,” and the goodnights/thank-you/outro theme
of Saturday Night Live.
Unlike Bob Neumeier, who left the vacancy
in the Boston booth that Goucher filled, Poster has stuck on Causeway Street,
so Schwartz has long since cut his ties with the Bruins family. Nonetheless, a
career that started gratifyingly early in Providence has carried him out to
Burbank, California.
When it comes to landing a glamorous
position with the P-Bruins, Goucher and Schwartz are anomalies among Rhode
Island’s native children, Wild more so and Acciari even more so. Like anywhere
else, with mixed doses of firmness and gentleness, reality ultimately kicks in
for everyone outside of that negligible percentage. But the changes of career
plans on the fly need not diminish the value of the memories millennials and
subsequent generations have and will continue to build around the Spoked-P base
in their respective upbringings.
The timing of the Baby B’s inception was
especially auspicious toward their effort to reach out to young fans. Sure, it
might have helped for the team to tout itself as the hockey equivalent of the
PawSox, and as such a way to fill the other half of the calendar with a live
professional sports experience in Ocean Staters’ backyard. But because a taste
for hockey is comparatively harder to instill to Americans, help from outside
forces would have been hard to say no to.
As it happened, the P-Bruins got that
assist from The Mighty Ducks, which
premiered in theaters four days before their first regular-season game in St.
John’s and two weeks before their inaugural home game. The Disney movie, which
was soon the namesake for an expansion NHL franchise that would briefly employ
the likes of Tim Sweeney and Steve King, quickly emerged as a Slap Shot for young audiences. In tandem
with Wayne Gretzky’s ongoing celebrity status as a Los Angeles King, it sparked
and sustained the sport’s interest among nineties kids across the country.
For Rhode Island, the simultaneous
emergence of a team with proud ties to the NHL franchise up in Boston could not
have been timelier. Kids whose appetite for the sport started with a spoonful
at the cinema could get a live scoop at the Civic Center. It was the same sport
and, thanks to the as-yet limited selection on the PA system’s playlist, many
of the same songs as in the movie.
Granted, demand for tickets made seats a
tad difficult to come by in the first year-plus. But otherwise, it was a new
form of cost-effective family entertainment for the 401 area code and
southeastern Massachusetts. Joining Sam Boni’s Cub Club was the cool thing to
do, and it did not take long for another carryover concept from the PawSox to
come to fruition. Those who were not doing so before would tune in to Boston
Bruins games on NESN or UPN-38 to see if, by any chance, someone who showed up
for a special visit at school or kindly gave an autograph back here in Rhode
Island was now playing for New England’s big city in the big leagues.
Within a few years, after Score-O had been
the sole on-ice intermission activity, many of those who had taken their
newfound or elevated passion to a youth program would have their chance to step
on the same ice as their idols. Like at so many other facilities, The Dunk has
long since made that a nightly staple, going so far as to have one six-minute
mini-game between both the second and third periods, and even longer-length
games beforehand while spectators are beginning to come through the turnstiles.
With the P-Bruins now entering their
second quarter-century of operation, the odds of a former youth player who
twirled in awe on the Civic Center ice watching their children do the same at
The Dunk increase by the game. Others who lack the ability to skate or the
interest in playing might get involved in a kids’ chorus that performs on the
ice before the opening faceoff or in their upper-bowl section during
intermission. With the more recent advent of those youth vocal acts, the
organization has shrewdly kept its integrity as a hockey experience, first and
foremost, while still selling itself as more than hockey. It is a way for
generations and worlds to collide in the Ocean State.
Being the compact state that it is
(the smallest in the union), Rhode Island takes everything that comes its way with
an effortless sense of community. That includes the inevitable touch of tragedy
when it strikes in any of the five counties. For the P-Bruins, the most jarring
community disaster in their first quarter-century of existence occurred in the
middle of the 2002-03 season. By the late hours of Thursday, February 20, 2003,
the eve of a home game against the Lowell Lock Monsters, the local news cycles
were focused on a horrifying fire caused by a pyrotechnic malfunction during a
Great White concert at West Warwick’s Station Nightclub. Between the blaze’s
rapid spread and substandard escape paths, one hundred attendees lost their
lives.
One of the victims was once a
regular at the Civic Center-turned-Dunk. William C. “Billy” Bonardi III, a
Rhode Island College graduate, had been a reporter for the now-defunct WALE
radio station. During his tenure there, one of his regular assignments involved
collecting sound bytes at P-Bruins press briefings.
In a Providence Journal obituary, Billy’s father told
author Tatiana Pina, “He was only 5 foot 5 and those hockey guys were huge.
They would always pick him out from the crowd of announcers to talk to.”
Bonardi was thirty-six at the time of his
death. With his and ninety-nine others, the Station Nightclub fire would be the
most devastating disaster in Rhode Island history.
The flames had broken out after the eleven
o’clock hour on Thursday night. Ocean Staters who had already retired for the
night woke up to the news that left them with heavy hearts throughout Friday.
But the Bruins chose to go forward with
their game on schedule, barely twenty hours after the locality’s sense of
normalcy had been robbed. Of the decision, team communications representative
Adam Alper told the Associated Press, “It’s better to do something and still have
the game but still recognize what happened last night. We saw after (Sept. 11)
it can be beneficial for people to go to a game and get away from it for a
while.”
Without fail, the club started doing its
part by collecting charitable donations at the gate. By night’s end, the fans
who got a much-needed diversion in the form of a 6-0 victory chipped in roughly
$7,500. An additional $1,000 apiece came from Providence Bruins Charities and
the league. The next week, every player, including North Smithfield’s own Jeff
Jillson, donated blood to help the 230 people still healing their physical
wounds.
Tragedy hit the Providence Bruins family
more directly in the summer of 2001 when staff member Amanda Hendricks
succumbed to leukemia at the age of twenty. Hendricks’ presence on the
Providence hockey scene had been palpable. After skating for the now-defunct
Lady Reds travel program, she pulled a double-life at the Civic Center, serving
as the club’s receptionist during office hours and donning the Sam Boni suit at
game time and community functions. Her connection to the team was such that, as
a GeoCities tribute page set up by her family noted, then-Bruins head coach
Bill Armstrong served as one of the pallbearers at her funeral.
In the subsequent 2001-02 season, the
Bruins sported Hendricks’ initials on the back of their helmets. They also
debuted the Amanda Hendricks Memorial Fan Appreciation Award, the franchise’s
first and still only piece of hardware named for a person. With it, Rhode
Island’s rooters can flex their knowledge of the team by voting to recognize
one player’s stellar performance, valiance, commitment to community service or
a combination thereof. Noteworthy recipients have verified the panel’s
expertise and attentiveness in both the year they have won the Hendricks Award
as well as sometimes thereafter.
At the end of his only AHL season, Patrice
Bergeron shared the fourth reception of the Hendricks with goaltender Hannu
Toivonen. Both men had been unmistakable key cogs in their positions on a team
that proceeded to reach the third round of the 2005 Calder Cup playoffs. But
besides blossoming as a top-notch two-way center and clutch scorer upon
returning to Boston, Bergeron has also demonstrated exemplary leadership in
game action and in the community. Case in point: he won the NHL’s 2013 King
Clancy Memorial Trophy for his charitable endeavors.
Besides Bergeron, two other former
Providence regulars on Boston’s 2011 Stanley Cup championship team were former
Hendricks winners. Defenseman Adam McQuaid and Brad Marchand garnered the honor
in 2009 and 2010, respectively. The following year, soon-to-be Black Ace and
Providence captain Trent Whitfield won it on the heels of a fervent and
productive comeback from an injury that had sidelined him for almost the entire
first half of the season.
Ten seasons after inaugurating the Hendricks
Fan Appreciation Award, and on the heels of completing their second decade, the
2011-12 P-Bruins garnered the AHL’s annual President’s Award for off-ice
achievements. The league’s official press release announcing the decision cited
the team’s community involvement, along with such initiatives from that season
as the Boston-Providence alumni game and Boston’s first intrasquad scrimmage
ever to take place at The Dunk. This was the year the AHL had shaved its
regular-season schedule from eighty to seventy-six games, leaving every arena
with two voids on the calendar. Those two creations were easy fillers in the
Ocean State market.
Citing an uptick in attendance at the
regular-season games, the press release also proclaimed, “A perennial leader in
overall business growth and success, the Providence Bruins experienced another
successful season in 2011-12.” Mind you, this was the P-Bruins’ third straight
season without a playoff berth. Yet local support, as far as the box office
could tell, was standing alone as a success story, and an award-winning one at
that.
In each of the five seasons following that
recognition, the Baby B’s have climbed back above the 8,000 threshold in
average nightly attendance, and have not looked back. As public-relations
leader Kevin Boryczki told Rhode Island Monthly’s Mike Stanton in 2014, “If we’re struggling on the ice, we’re still
going to have a good crowd. When they leave, they may not know who won or lost
the game, but they know they had a good time. This is a great family night out.
That’s how we pitch it.”
Some may point to that assessment as an
admission of artificial attraction to the games. But the fact remains that the
P-Bruins continue to appeal to a sufficient stock of genuine fans looking for
any combination of quality pro hockey at an affordable price, Rhode Island
pride and a chance to cheer on Boston’s NHL aspirants. The gravy that, as
Stanton reported, has swelled annual group ticket sales from barely five
figures to deep six figures since the turn of the century, is no harm and no
knock.
In fact, the Baby B’s were the basis for
their new parent company, Providence Sports + Entertainment, which emerged
early in the current decade. In Stanton’s words from his 2014 article, “Essentially,
the State of Rhode Island…hired the Providence Bruins to help sell Disney on
Ice and Cirque du Soleil, Mahler and Mozart, The Nutcracker and Peter Pan.”
What was that slogan from the 2013-14
season again? Oh, right, and it all started with and worked so well for the
P-Bruins that the same business savvy now encompasses nearly all of Downcity’s
essential entertainment entities.
It is not hard to label this franchise’s
fanfare as fluff at this juncture. It is impossible to do.
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