For
the better part of the P-Bruins’ existence, the AHL’ alignment, geography-based
(not to mention cost-effective) matchup frequency and playoff format have
virtually restricted their rivalry sustainability to fellow New England cities.
However, in recent years, the league’s shedding of New England teams has
brought Providence and the three Pennsylvania franchises into one division. In
the five seasons spanning 2012-13 through 2016-17, the Baby B’s have met the
Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins in the playoffs four times. Meanwhile, the Hershey
Bears are always a formidable foe in the quest for the subjective bragging
rights as the best AHL fan base. There is also a noteworthy history between the
Bruins and the team that has answered to the nickname Phantoms in three
different cities, including two in the Keystone State, since 1996.
When the late Mayor Buddy Cianci insisted on
adopting Boston’s nickname when he brought the Bruins’ affiliate to Providence,
he presumably meant no harm to Hershey. But it is equally safe to guess that a
few Bears buffs were less than thrilled with having a new league member whose
nickname was basically a synonym for theirs.
That nugget of trivia aside, the
Bears had been around since the AHL’s formative years, meaning they logged
plenty of classic showdowns with the Providence Reds. Renewing the
Hershey-Providence card was cause for celebration among fans of a certain age
in both cities. Fittingly enough, the Bears were the guests when the P-Bruins
hosted their first regular-season home game in 1992.
When the AHL became a four-division,
two-conference entity in 1995, it would be years before the two ursine brands
had a chance to form a genuine rivalry on the ice. For years, the exception was
1996-97, when the league briefly experimented with a Northern and Southern
Conference. The latter conference had Providence in the New England Division,
Hershey the Mid-Atlantic. Otherwise, the cities were Eastern and Western
Conference satellites, respectively, until 2004-05. (This, incidentally,
created the same infrequency of Bruins battles with the Philadelphia Phantoms
upon their arrival in 1996 and that of the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins in
1999.)
But from the start, the Bears and
Bruins did have a rivalry at the top of the AHL’s attendance leaderboard. In
the final year of the Maine Mariners, Hershey finished a close second to the
league’s other time-honored brand, the Rochester Americans, for tops in that
category.
In 1992-93, the Bears edged out the
Amerks, but settled for a distant second behind the newfangled P-Bruins. The
next year, they were one of only two teams with an average nightly audience
exceeding 6,000. But they finished second yet again because Providence had the
only facility attracting more than 9,000 fans per night. Without question, that
was a key factor in getting the first modern AHL All-Star Classic to the Civic
Center in 1995, whereas Hersheypark Arena waited for the second in 1996.
The decisive one-two finish repeated
in 1994-95, and Providence elongated its attendance championship dynasty to
four years in 1995-96. Afterwards, the Bears partnered with the Colorado
Avalanche while their old parent club, the Philadelphia Flyers, transferred
their prospects closer to home. With Philly’s new NHL facility, the CoreStates
Center, opening in the fall of 1996, the new Phantoms took root next door at
the hallowed, haunted Spectrum.
A combination of peerless proximity to the
parent club, a cheaper deal and success on the ice made Philadelphia the AHL’s
new attendance king in an instant. Providence took Hershey’s old spot as the
runner-up in that category in 1996-97. The Phantoms would lead the league in
attendance for each of their first six seasons of operation, after which
Manchester held the title three times, Chicago once.
Since then, although the Bruins have drawn
a consistently healthy following, the Bears have regained their dominance.
Beginning with their defense of the 2006 Calder Cup championship, Hershey’s
hockey heroes have topped the attendance chart for eleven successive seasons.
During that time, they have finally had a
few postseason encounters with their fellow ursine squad. After Providence
stole Game 1 from the Giant Center, the Bears roared back to take the next four
and win the 2009 Eastern Conference Final. It would be the P-Bruins’ last
playoff appearance until 2013, when they surmounted a 2-0 deficit to take the
best-of-five first round from Hershey.
After a slew of Western relocations left
them in the same division for the first time, Hershey and Providence finished
first and second, respectively, in the Atlantic. But they would wait another
year before they had their third playoff card, with the Bruins prevailing, four
games to three, in the division final.
Several notable names have worn both
uniforms in the ultimate ursine battle. Tim Tookey and Bill Armstrong were both
on the visiting bench when the Bears visited the Civic Center for the P-Bruins’
inaugural home game. Two years later, they were wearing the Spoked-P when
Providence hosted Hershey to kick off the 1994-95 season. Prolific journeyman pivot
Mitch Lamoureux had three separate stints with the Bears, each lasting two
seasons apiece. In between the second and third of those stops, he was a key
cog for the Bob Francis-led P-Bruins, leading them with twenty-five goals and
twenty-nine assists in 1996-97.
Chris Bourque has the distinction of
playing in all three Bruins-Bears playoff series. He won with Hershey in 2009,
won with Providence in 2013 and lost with Hershey in 2017. Over all of the
seventeen playoff games between the teams, Bourque has aggregated nine goals
(including the 2009 series clincher) and eleven assists.
But in terms of clashes with the Keystone
State, the P-Bruins have spent their last five years forging a peerless feud
with a team that came into existence the same year they won the Calder Cup.
When Wilkes-Barre/Scranton got on the
professional hockey scene in 1999, the market had a preexisting history with
Rhode Island in baseball. A decade prior, one year after the Maine Guides
became the Maine Phillies, their namesake parent club pulled them into their
home state, where they resurfaced as the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Red Barons. The
city has since fielded a team in the same International League division as the
PawSox, including the dreaded Yankees’ affiliate every season since 2007.
But it would be a while before the markets
could cross paths for anything noteworthy in hockey. Just like the Bears, the
Penguins would be separated from the Bruins by the AHL’s conference boundary
for the matchup’s formative years. In their first thirteen years, 2008 was the
closest they came to meeting Providence in the playoffs. Now both based in the
East, each team reached its respective division final. Wilkes-Barre/Scranton
would advance to the third round by knocking off Philadelphia, taking the
clinching Game 5 on May 9. But that same evening, the regular-season “champion”
P-Bruins were eliminated by Portland in Game 6 of the Atlantic Division final.
Five years later, the league having
switched to a one-through-eight conference seeding bracket, a minor-league
battle of the black-and-gold brigades was more feasible. It came to fruition in
the 2013 Eastern Conference semifinals after Providence rallied against Hershey
and the Penguins swept Binghamton.
For a first-ever playoff matchup between
fairly unfamiliar parties, Game 1 threatened to induce carpal tunnel to the
scoresheet scribes with its thirteen goals and twenty-four penalty calls.
Besides a not-so-surprising four-point effort to pilot an 8-5 home victory,
Chris Bourque raised eyebrows by incurring one half of the first set of
coincidental penalties (unsportsmanlike conduct) on the night.
There would ultimately be seven pairs of
offsetting infractions, five of which came in one dustup with 6:14 left in the
third period. Bobby Robins drew extra box time for instigating a fight with
Penguins defenseman Alex Grant, and the visitors used the ensuing power play to
close the gap on the scoreboard to 6-4. But after a quick follow-up brought
Wilkes-Barre to within one, Providence perked back up for a pair of late
insurance strikes. All but five Bruins skaters etched at least one point in the
winning effort.
One of those five exceptions was blueliner
Torey Krug, but the radiant rookie factored crucially into Game 2 the following
night. His primary assist on Jamie Tardif’s second power-play conversion of the
game amounted to the third of four unanswered goals late in the opening frame.
It would hold up as the winner in a 4-2 decision.
By the time the series resumed in
Pennsylvania four nights later, Krug had followed fellow defensive prospect
Matt Bartkowski to the parent club. In the interim, Boston had pulled off its
historic Game 7 rally from a 4-1 deficit to knock off Toronto and set up its
second-round card with the Rangers. Providence pressed on without Krug’s
services in Game 3, edging the Penguins in overtime, 2-1, to raise a commanding
3-0 upper hand.
But while Krug started to heat up his twig
at the stunning expense of Henrik Lundqvist and the Blueshirts, he would soon
be missed back on the farm. Carter Camper’s first-period icebreaker accounted
for the Bruins’ only goal in Games 4 and 5, which the host Pens won by 3-1 and
4-0 scores.
On a midweek journey back to The Dunk, the
sudden silence of the Spoked-P strike force continued. An early 1-0 lead via
Craig Cunningham was nullified within five minutes on a Wilkes-Barre/Scranton
power play, and the Penguins forced Game 7 on the strength of Trevor Smith’s
overtime goal. In the two-night interim before the deciding tilt, Bruins buffs
were undoubtedly rehashing old, yet not-so-distant wounds from 2010, when the
parent club let a 3-0 series lead escape, then let a favor 3-0 goal
differential give way to a 4-3 home loss to the Philadelphia Flyers in Game 7.
In terms of comebacks or collapses from
3-0 gaps in New England sports history, the completion of this one would more
closely resemble that of the 2004 ALCS, but with the P-Bruins filling the
Yankees’ old role. A crowd of 3,838 filed in and watched their hometown team
blow a pair of unanswered power plays in the scoreless first period. To drive
home another unfavorable omen, Bourque took Providence’s first penalty for
slashing at 3:30 of the middle frame, then got unwanted parole when Chad
Kolarik converted for the equalizer.
The Bruins would not draw themselves
another power play until the final minute of the second period. In between, a
flurry of offense saw Wilkes-Barre/Scranton quadruple its lead to 4-0 with
three strikes the one-impenetrable Niklas Svedberg in a span of four minutes
and eleven seconds. For the closing stanza, the 2013 AHL Eastern Conference
All-Star starter and recipient of the Baz Bastien Award took the bench in favor
of Michael Hutchinson. At the other end, Brad Thiessen continued his stretch of
newfound efficiency while Hutchinson blinked for the period’s only goal,
securing a 5-0 romp and finalizing the epic comeback for the Penguins.
For the Bruins faithful, besides the
obvious bitterest-pill nature of the collapse, the series had a few parallels
to the 2010 parent club’s own mortifying meltdown. In both cases, it took place
in the second round, with the Game 7 culmination occurring at home. Both of the
triumphant rivals represented an Eastern Pennsylvania city. And just as
Massachusetts native Peter Laviolette oversaw Philadelphia’s comeback against
Boston, Rhode Islander John Hynes (a Warwick native, to be exact) guided
Wilkes-Barre/Scranton past Providence.
As it happened, the next month, the big-league
Bruins and Penguins had their own playoff meeting. There, Ocean Staters and
general B’s buffs got a measure of redemption when Boston upset first-place
Pittsburgh in a sweep to take the NHL’s Eastern Conference title. But back in
the AHL, Bruce Cassidy and his holdovers would get their chance to have their
own retribution when the same matchup came up in the same round of the 2014
playoffs.
Both teams were coming off first-round
upsets of a regular-season division champion, the P-Bruins grounding the
Falcons and the Penguins once again getting the better of the B-Sens. As the
sixth seed in the Eastern Conference, Wilkes-Barre/Scranton would host
seventh-seeded Providence to commence the 2014 rematch. New Englanders who
invest in omens likely took that as an auspicious sign, as Boston had likewise
begun its vengeful 2011 sweep of the Flyers with a lopsided Game 1 victory in
Philadelphia. Here, on May 9, 2014, the Baby B’s bounced the Baby Pens, 4-0.
Rookie Alexander Khokhlachev bookended a first-period frenzy of four goals in
exactly six-and-a-half minutes, and Svedberg handled a light twenty-shot
workload all night.
Hynes’ pupils resurged the next night,
though, with the help of two NHL veterans. A seesaw first period saw WBS
holding a 2-1 lead late before former Boston Bruins forward Chuck Kobasew set
up Anton Zlobin’s second goal in as many minutes. Kobasew then added his own,
with an assist going to grizzled captain Tom Kostopolous, in the momentous
final minute of the stanza. The shell-shocked Bruins never recovered, and the
Pens paced themselves to a 6-1 retort.
So, at least there would be no rerun of
the ultimate fall-from-ahead collapse this year. But the Penguins still looked
to have Svedberg and the P-Bruins’ number when, in Game 3 at The Dunk, they
overcame a 4-1 deficit to claim a 5-4 triumph in double-overtime. Providence resurged
again for its own sudden-death victory, but WBS reclaimed home-ice advantage by
stealing Game 5 and giving itself two chances to clinch the series back home.
On Monday, May 19, Khokhlachev and
Svedberg both returned to Game 1 form. The radiant Russian sandwiched his own
two goals around an assist to Robins while the Swedish stopper stayed perfect
until Conor Sheary beat him with 2:57 left in regulation. The three-goal
advantage came back within sixty-eight seconds, as Ryan Spooner’s unassisted empty-net
conversion put Game 6 away. With that, the roles of the road team forcing Game
7 back at the same site for two nights had reversed.
Svedberg looked prime for redress after a
yearlong wait when he held a scoreless tie intact despite a 10-3 shooting disadvantage
for his team in the first period of the rubber match. But in the second minute
of the middle frame, a neutral-zone turnover sent Anton Zlobin swooping in down
the left alley, where he let a long-range bid pinball past Svedberg. Precisely
one minute later, Jared Knight took the first Providence penalty. During
Knight’s second, Svedberg strayed from his crease as the Pens moved the puck at
a dizzying rate, allowing Sheary to feed a gaping goal mouth for the 2-0 lead.
Amidst a four-on-four sequence, the hosts
doubled their lead on back-to-back rushes, with Brian Gibbons polishing the
latter on a highlight-reel dance through the defense before beating a sprawling
Svedberg, who was subsequently benched for the second Game 7 in as many years.
Successor Malcolm Subban’s shift was all of 101 seconds old when Brendan
Mikkelson beat him on a low-flying point blast through a screen. On the same
sequence, Providence captain Mike Moore and Kobasew incurred coincidental
minors for unsportsmanlike conduct.
The Bruins gasped to display a little life
at opportune moments to flank the second intermission. David Warsofsky drew a
round of business-like fist bumps when he put his team on the board by slapping
home a shorthanded shot from the left circle top in the final minute of the
chaotic middle stanza. On the opening shift of the next period, Spooner
strolled in and singed goaltender Peter Mannino on a long-range bid from the
high slot.
None other than Khokhlachev tantalized the
fans back in Rhode Island all the more when he single-handedly closed the gap
to 5-4. His second strike game on a power play while Philip Samuelsson, son of
former Cam Neely nemesis Ulf Samuelsson, was boxed for interference. And there
was still 10:05 left on the clock.
With the 5-4 difference still intact,
Samuelsson went off once more for slashing with 1:13 to spare. But instead of
completing a timely hat trick, Khokhlachev nullified the power play with his
own double-minor for slashing. He was joined by Mikkelson (guilty of
cross-checking), and they all watched the Penguins hold on for the final
fifteen seconds.
Same matchup, same round, different
pattern, different venue for the finish, same basic outcome. The Baby B’s were
again denied a passport to the conference finals via John Hynes and the Baby
Pens.
In the summer of 2015, with a handful of
East Coast franchise moving to the Pacific Time Zone, the AHL radically
realigned, reverting to two divisions for each conference. Between these
changes, the P-Bruins and Penguins, became Atlantic Division cohabitants for
the first time. And as it happened, the league also returned to its former
playoff format of division-based seeding and matchups for the first two rounds.
Adding another dimension of intrigue to
the matchup, former Providence and Boston Bruins coach Mike Sullivan was the
new bench boss for WBS. That was, at least for the first twenty-three games, as
he was elevated to fill the same position in Pittsburgh at midseason. In his
place stepped Rhode Island native and former 1992-93 P-Bruin Clark Donatelli.
His assistant was former PC Friars and P-Bruins captain Jay Leach.
Under Sullivan, the AHL Penguins went an
otherworldly 18-5-0, including a 2-1 overtime escape from Providence on opening
night and a 3-0 shutout at home. After the change, Donatelli charged up 25-22-6
record, including an empty 0-4-0 head-to-head finish against Bruce Cassidy and
company.
And wouldn’t you know it? After going
4-1-1 overall in their 2015-16 regular-season series, the B’s finished second
in the Atlantic, three points ahead of the third-place Pens. A best-of-five
showdown in the Atlantic Division semifinals was set.
Despite the seeding, scheduling oddities
had the series starting in Pennsylvania, with Games 3 and, if necessary, 4 and
5 back in Rhode Island. But home ice would not hold nearly as much sway as
clutch proficiency in this series. Carter Rowney scored sixty-nine seconds into
overtime to draw first blood for the Penguins, 3-2.
Noel Acciari and Colby Cave each struck
unassisted to give the visitors a 2-0 lead at the twenty-minute mark of Game 2,
but the hosts flipped that into a 3-2 edge, then rebounded after Frank Vatrano
forced bonus action. Daniel Sprong’s tally with 5:13 in Game 2’s extra period
put the Bruins in a 2-0 pothole coming home.
Going into Game 3 on Saturday, April 23,
the P-Bruins had never been swept out of the Calder Cup playoffs at a
full-fledged stage (i.e. not counting the short-lived best-of-three qualifiers).
But there is a first time for everything.
When rookie sensation Jake Guentzel out of
Nebraska-Omaha powered the Penguins to a 3-0 lead with a goal and two assists,
that first time was thirty-four minutes and twenty-six seconds away. The teams
traded goals before the second intermission, leaving Providence in a 4-1
pothole with twenty minutes left to preserve its season.
As they had done two years prior, the
Bruins made a game out of their elimination bout with the Penguins through a
frenzied third period. Chris Breen and fourth-year defenseman Tommy Cross
closed the gap to 4-3 before 5:30 was gone. None other than Khokhlachev
subsequently set up Austin Czarnik’s equalizer, forcing the third overtime of
the series and the seventh in the matchup’s full seventeen-game playoff
history.
Goaltender Jeremy Smith, who had relieved
Zane McIntyre for the third period, remained perfect through what would be
fifty-three minutes and fifty-one seconds of play. After halting six shots in
the last regulation stanza, he repelled eleven in the opening overtime, then
another half-seven in the subsequent fifth period, which started with a pair of
unanswered, overlapping Providence penalties.
But his last second and last shot against,
off the stick of Guentzel, was also the last of the P-Bruins’ twenty-fourth
season. The next morning, in a series of bullet points wrapping up the season, Providence Journal scribe Mark Divver credited the friend-turned-foe behind the Baby Pens bench. Divver wrote, “Stick
tap to Wilkes-Barre/Scranton coach and Rhode Island native Clark Donatelli,
whose passion for the game is refreshing. He pressed all the right buttons in
the first round.”
With three Providence losses in as many
all-time series against the city in question, Wilkes-Barre/Scranton had become
the new Springfield. With that said, in 2014, between the first and second of
those Penguin-induced downfalls, the Spoked-Ps made the fourth time the charm
in their playoff annals against Springfield. When it came to the WBS market,
they would not defer the sweet side of the same pattern to their franchise
descendants. A first-round rematch in 2017 saw the first-place Pens split the
first two games in Providence, then won the set’s third straight one-goal
decision, giving them two cracks at a clincher on home ice the same way they
had done in 2014.
But even in the losing effort in Game 3,
the Bruins had one moment that Providence
Journal puck guru Mark Divver would later cite as a turning point. With the
visitors trailing, 1-0, seasoned scrapper Tyler Randell dropped his mitts with
fellow veteran Tom Sestito on the first shift of the third period. As close as
every game was the postseason prior, each having gone to overtime and all, many
had attributed Wilkes-Barre/Scranton’s command, in part, to Sestito’s
intimidation factor.
Randell would later explain to Divver, “I just wanted to
eliminate that by showing I could do the same thing. He takes a run at one of
our guys, I’m coming right back at one of theirs. He messes with (Austin)
Czarnik, I’m going to grab (Kevin) Porter or something along that line. That
fight settled him down and we were able to play our game.”
The Randell-Sestito card was the second
fight of the night. It did not yield much immediate change in the P-Bruins’
fortunes, as Bruin-turned-Penguin David Warsofsky slugged home the eventual
game-clincher on a power play eighty-five seconds later, doubling the WBS lead
to 2-0 at that point. But it would the last major dustup of the series and the
last instance in which Sestito figured prominently into anything.
Besides that, another slew of role
reversals had already taken shape. Leach was now on the staff of new Providence
head coach Kevin Dean, as was Trent Whitfield, whose last season of North
American play had ended in the 2013 collapse. Together, the troika orchestrated
a rally that saw Wayne Simpson and Colton Hargrove break open a 2-0 advantage.
Jake Debrusk followed with two unanswered tallies, the first coming with
forty-five seconds left in the first period of Game 4. The eventual 4-0 lead
was sufficient sustenance for an eventual 4-2 victory that forced Game 5.
Two days later, a pair of former rivals in
the NCHC college conference powered the P-Bruins. Denver product Danton Heinen
converted a power play in the first, then doubled the resultant lead with
exactly seven minutes left in regulation. North Dakota’s McIntyre had been
perfect amidst a firestorm of vulcanized rubber, including twenty-one saves in
the opening frame alone.
He finally blinked on a penalty kill
ninety-seven seconds after Heinen’s first goal. But otherwise, he stopped fifty
of fifty-one shots faced on the day, ensuring that Heinen’s second tally held
up as the game and series winner.
As previous iterations had done with
Worcester in 1997, Hartford and Worcester in 2001 and Hartford in 2007, the
P-Bruins had won a winner-take-all playoff road game after facing elimination
at one or more previous stages of the series. They would do it again one round
later when they rallied to oust the Bears in Game 7 at Hershey’s Giant Center
for the 2017 playoff Atlantic Division title.
With relatively limited realignment, the
AHL’s Atlantic Division will retain all seven of its tenants from 2016-17 in
the 2017-18 season. The only change is the addition of the Charlotte Checkers
(farm team of the Carolina Hurricanes, otherwise known as the ex-Hartford
Whalers). This means the Baby B’s will continue to see a generous share of the
other surviving New England teams, plus the three Pennsylvania franchises.
If the Penguins and Bears continue to
fulfill their parents’ wishes to keep honing top-notch talent to build around
Sidney Crosby and Alexander Ovechkin, respectively, they ought to remain
competitive for years to come. Hartford and Springfield should be amped as
always for their frequent crossings with Providence as well.
Translation: The next quarter-century of
Providence Bruins hockey should still come with occasional epic conflicts for
New England bragging rights. But there is also something to be said about one
team acting as the pride of New England against a Mid-Atlantic titan, which
were the roles the P-Bruins and Bears assumed in their most recent division
final. The latter breed of battle should have a greater piece of the chronicle
in the next twenty-five years than it had in the Spoked-P’s first twenty-five
seasons.
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