Ten
years after he called the first Providence-Worcester Calder Cup playoff series
for WPRO, Boston Bruins radio announcer Dave Goucher granted an interview to the Worcester Telegram. When the
subject of that series came up, he recalled, “The fans from both teams made
that trip up and down Route 146…That was the best part of it. The proximity of
the two teams lent itself to a pretty good rivalry and the fans got involved in
it.”
Granted, proximity is not unique to
the now-defunct rivalries the P-Bruins have had with the Worcester IceCats and
Worcester Sharks. That element can be said of Providence’s equally enriched
historic feuds with Hartford and Springfield and the slightly less storied
matchups with various Bridgeport, Lowell, Manchester and New Haven franchises.
Still, Route 146, as Goucher
referenced, is unique to the Worcester rivalry. In addition, the two cities in
question are wedged in New England in ways other nearby cities are not.
Hartford has its half-New York vibe. Springfield, and the western portion of
Massachusetts in general, has its history of Whalers loyalty and partnership.
And it is also more inclined to act as a New England-New York salad bowl of
sports allegiances than other major pockets of the region.
Not so much with Worcester and
Providence, hence the elevated incentive for regional bragging rights that
would drive fans, along with their autos or MBTA services, to each other’s
buildings.
If Boston is the patriarch of the New England
geographic family, then Providence and Worcester are the two brothers vying for
parental favoritism. For decades, the Rhode Island capital and the Central
Massachusetts nucleus have waged a perpetual footrace for the distinction of
New England’s second-largest city. At the time of the 2010 Census, Worcester’s population
boasted barely 3,000 more residents than Providence. Unlike most of the
region’s other large cities, both are considered a part of Greater Boston and
are both tucked decisively in a pure New England location. This distinguishes
them from, say, parts of Connecticut and Western Massachusetts that feel like
New York or the slightly Canadianized portions of Vermont, New Hampshire and
Maine.
Though Worcester has yet to house a
Bruins affiliate at any level, its last AHL team pulled no punches in the
effort to assert its territory on the New England sports scene. The Worcester
Sharks used to run ads on both the New England Sports Network and 98.5 The
Sports Hub, the Boston Bruins’ television and radio partners. On March 25,
2011, they gave away bobbleheads of Kathryn Tappen, who at the time was NESN’s
studio host for the Bruins pregame, intermission and postgame presentations.
The dolls had a stick-wielding Tappen in Sharks regalia, and the real Tappen
was on hand for a ceremonial puck-drop that night.
A year later, after colorful Patriots
tight end Rob Gronkowski was fined by the NFL for an excessive celebration, the
Sharks offered to cover the cost. In exchange, Gronkowski graced the DCU Center
with his presence three weeks after losing Super Bowl XLVI to the Giants and
ceremoniously spiked a trick puck that fell to shards on the ice. He came to
another game in mid-January of 2014 to boost a charity fundraiser.
The visiting team on both Tappen and
Gronkowski’s moments in the Sharks spotlight? The Providence Bruins.
Coincidence?
There is cause for reasonable doubt, yet
one could not blame anyone from Rhode Island or Southeastern Massachusetts for
suspecting Worcester of trying to alter the scales of Boston’s influence.
Knowing it had a losing battle on its hands against the Ocean State capital,
the Central Massachusetts epicenter was tightening its tug on the teddy bear.
The two cities also have a historically
stylistic clash of means geared toward the same basic end, namely prosperity as
a city. In a fascinating May 2013 post on his now-defunct publicsectorinc.org
blog (reprinted on Urbanophile), Massachusetts-educated political scientist
Stephen Eide did a comprehensive side-by-side Providence-Worcester comparison.
Eide led off his write-up as follows:
“Worcester, MA and Providence, RI invite comparison for at least four reasons.
They’re the same size…they share the same history of deindustrialization and
urban decline, they’re only 40 miles apart, and they’re different, which makes
comparison stimulating and worthwhile.”
To that point, the rest of Eide’s report
read much like a national columnist’s preview of a playoff series featuring two
evenly matched titans. Each city, he ruled, had its various share of advantages
in the downtown, the economics and the education system.
His conclusion: “Worcester may outperform
Providence, but that’s not setting a very high standard. Perhaps the possible,
not the ideal should define standards for urban success. If so, then the
conventional wisdom is accurate, and Providence does deserve to be more closely
studied and more highly regarded than Worcester.”
What we have here is a never-settled
score, kind of like what you see in a time-honored athletic rivalry. And because
of the various distinctions, the civic sibling rivalry between Providence and Worcester
was bound to find a place in the sporting universe. With their populations and
venues, both can make convincing cases to house a Boston affiliate. In fact,
when the Rhode Island Red Sox were struggling in the mid-seventies, rumors had
Worcester as the new destination.
Ben Mondor, a Canadian expatriate with
fond memories of attending Reds games, eventually took ownership and committed
to keeping the Triple-A Sox in Pawtucket. Nonetheless, Worcester has continued
to come up as a speculated destination for the team if Rhode Island does not
work out.
In terms of landing pro hockey,
Providence’s history with the Reds was clearly a selling point when the Maine
Mariners made their transfer. However, with the Centrum, Worcester had a venue
of virtually the same size and a similar recent history of hosting major
college hockey events even when there was no team for the building to call its
own. The NCAA started holding its first two tournament rounds at neutral venues
in 1992, with the East Regional for that year taking place at the Civic Center.
The next season, while Providence was enjoying the inaugural season of the
P-Bruins, the Centrum hosted the East Regional.
The fall of 1993 would not bring Worcester
the same immediate AHL follow-up on that NCAA appetizer Providence enjoyed, but
Central Massachusetts did not remain untapped for long. Two years after the
P-Bruins came to be, the Centrum stole the Springfield Indians and rechristened
them the Worcester IceCats.
With the Indians’ successor, the
Falcons, becoming the Hartford Whalers’ new AHL partner, the clean slate was
accentuated all the more as the IceCats began as an independent team. In
addition, their inauguration coincided with a half-season NHL lockout. With the
Boston Bruins out of action until mid-January, the two AHL teams located a
one-hour drive in different directions from the Garden saw their competition
for fanfare heat up.
In the end, enough people in and around Worcester
chose hometown pride over organizational pride to place the IceCats eighth
among the league’s sixteen teams in attendance, while Providence still finished
first. The nightly median of 5,473 spectators at the Centrum was all the more
impressive given that Worcester’s team finished dead last in the league
standings.
The new franchise’s first battle
with the Bruins, held on October 14, 1994 at the Providence Civic Center, was
fairly indicative of where each team was going that year. Winger Sandy Moger
and defenseman Jeff Wells both turned in multipoint efforts to co-pilot the
P-Bruins to a 5-2 victory. Eight days later, the IceCats fed off their home
fans in the rematch, taking an identical 5-2 decision at the Centrum. But the
Bruins would finish the twelve-game season series with an 8-3-1 advantage.
The next year, the IceCats partnered
with both the St. Louis Blues and New York Islanders, and a sophomore surge
ensued on the ice. They improved their win total by twelve and their point
count by twenty-nine, good for second place in the Northern Division.
Accordingly, they also raised the nightly average attendance by nearly 1,000
rooters.
Providence, which topped the AHL
attendance chart for the fourth and final consecutive year, felt the effects in
a hurry. The Bruins brooked a 5-2 loss at the Centrum to commence their 1995-96
schedule. Home ice would hold sway for the better part of the season series,
with all four P-Bruins wins coming in the campaign’s first four confrontations
at the Civic Center. But the Cats ultimately claimed a 4-0-2 record in games at
their mansion while stealing their last two visits to Rhode Island to go 6-4-2
head-to-head overall.
Worcester’s partnership with St.
Louis, and now also the Ottawa Senators, continued to have no ill effects on local
fanfare in 1996-97. If anything, it only served bigger success on the ice and,
in turn, at the gate. Under new head coach Greg Gilbert’s guidance, the third-year
IceCats surged to 100 points and first place in the New England Division. They
also placed fourth in league attendance, trailing third-place Providence and
two new teams in Kentucky and Philadelphia.
Much of the difference in the
divisional seeding race worked in Worcester’s favor at the P-Bruins’ direct
expense. After they traded road wins in mid-October and on Veteran’s Day,
Providence lost six straight head-to-head regulation decisions from
mid-December to the first weekend of April. The sixth installment of that
one-sided slew was the most agonizing for the Ocean State faithful, as the host
Bruins logged a single-game franchise record sixty-six shots on goal. But with
NESN cameras and a substantial bipartisan audience on hand, IceCats goalie
Travis Scott seized the spotlight with sixty-four saves, enough to help his
team escape with a 3-2 triumph.
The next night was Part II of a
home-and-home set, the penultimate regular-season meeting between the two clubs
and the P-Bruins’ final chance to reaffirm that they could steal a game from
the Centrum before a likely playoff confrontation. Late-season rookie
acquisition Derek Herlofsky seized his moment in net, sustaining a scoreless
staring contest with Mike Buzak while Worcester ran up a 30-10 shots advantage
through the first forty minutes. With 8:41 to spare in the closing frame, Todd
Elik found the net at the other end, and his goal held up as the decider.
When Herlofsky kept his shutout streak
going for a 5-0 whitewash of the Fredericton Canadiens back home the next day,
the Bruins secured their playoff bid. And by finishing fourth in the New
England Division — twenty-five points behind the team that had taken sixteen
out of twenty in their direct bids — they had anywhere from three to five
additional faceoffs with Worcester to come.
In an ironic twist, the parent
Boston Bruins had finished in the NHL’s twenty-six team cellar, ending their
North American sports record streak of twenty-nine consecutive playoff
appearances. None other than Worcester’s main affiliate in St. Louis picked up
the relinquished distinction for the league’s longest active playoff streak at
eighteen seasons. The Senators were also in the 1997 Stanley Cup tournament,
which meant only the P-Bruins would be getting reinforcements from their parent
club.
That did not seem to matter at
first. If anything, the IceCats more or less kept the same makeup and chemistry
from the homestretch and translated it to two come-from-behind 5-4 victories in
a pair of penalty-filled contests. With that, Providence was in an instant hole
in the best-of-five opening round. But then Bruins bench boss Bob Francis
inspired the first of the franchise’s aforementioned comeback cubs, who rallied
to deny Worcester what would have been its first-ever AHL playoff-series win.
As it happened, though in a much
less dramatic fashion, Gilbert’s pupils redeemed themselves the next spring
when they finished fourth in the division, only to knock off the first-place
Falcons in the first round. Naturally, that year was when the Baby B’s receded
decisively, finishing fifth and trailing the Cats by a margin of thirty-three
points. As part of their playoff no-go campaign, Tom McVie’s mistakes went
3-5-1 in their season series with the IceCats, including two losses by a
five-goal margin and a 5-1 fizzle in the season finale.
That notwithstanding, one had to
think there were more than a few Worcester fans thirsting for some eye-for-eye
justice in the wake of 1997. Going into the 1999 tournament, the regular-season
champion P-Bruins had the fourth-place IceCats on tap for the New England
Division semifinals. And this was coming on the heels on another lopsided
regular-season series, which Providence won with a 7-1-2 record.
By this time, three holdovers from
the first Providence-Worcester playoff round had switched sides. Former Bruins
fan favorite Kevin “The Destroyer” Sawyer was now the IceCats’ penalty-minute
leader. Terry Virtue, now a prolific point patroller for the P-Bruins, had been
in action for Worcester in all five of those 1997 tilts. Marquis Mathieu, a depth
forward and checking-liner, played one of those 1997 games for the IceCats.
Virtue would ultimately finish at the top of the IceCats’ all-time scoring chart
with 154 assists and 210 points. He also captained the club in his final year
with Worcester in 1997-98. But as part of his subsequent one-year wonder under
the Bruins’ auspices, he quickly helped himself and Mathieu to individual redemption
at the expense of their old allies.
Eric Nickulas, who would later be
Worcester’s captain in 2002-03, fueled Providence to a 4-1 home win with a
shorthanded goal in Game 1. The series stayed at the Civic Center for the next
night, where local product Steve King snapped a late deadlock en route to a 3-1
victory.
Clearly, this was not going to be the
back-and-forth/anyone’s-game/one-game-at-a-time saga from two years prior.
After a six-night gap between the change of scenery, Gilbert goaded his charges
just enough to salvage a 5-3 home win in Game 3. But the next night (May 1) was
a new month and a new story with old aspects. Peter Laviolette’s high-octane
force took a 6-3 decision, with Nickulas’ hat trick spelling the difference.
Old friend Mathieu provided the second dose of insurance as part of a
dagger-driving sugar rush after Antti Laaksonen scored the eventual clincher
with 7:05 remaining in regulation.
For the second time in as many playoff
sets, Providence prevailed and conducted the subsequent handshakes on IceCats
property. The 1999 P-Bruins went on to consummate their Cyclopean persona by
winning the next three rounds and the Calder Cup.
Another score was settled, for a time.
Within two years, the roles were flipped yet again, as Worcester succeeded the
1998-99 P-Bruins and 1999-00 Hartford Wolf Pack as the holders of the MacGregor
Kilpatrick Trophy. Having secured home ice for every round of the 2001
playoffs, the IceCats were at least the paper-based favorites for the
franchise’s third postseason meeting with Providence.
But the third-seeded B’s only made that matchup
possible by dethroning the Wolf Pack in the New England Division semifinals,
setting up a best-of-seven second-round card. In addition, Providence had won
the regular-season series, 5-3-2. The Bruins had won two of those meetings by a
five-goal margin, including an 8-3 rout on January 12, during which defenseman
Jonathan Girard set a franchise record with six assists on the night.
Then again, Worcester had won the last
regular-season meeting at the Centrum, 3-0. That result was indicative of the
team’s capabilities on the blue line and in the blue paint.
Ten years ahead of time, New England
hockey fans caught a fascinating glimpse of many things to come for the 2011
Boston Bruins. Not only was the team in black and gold facing a blue- and
green-clad regular-season champion (as Boston would in the Stanley Cup Final),
but the opposing netminder was a grizzled guy by the name of Dwayne Roloson (as
was the case in the conference final).
By 2011, Roloson had already backstopped
the 2003 Minnesota Wild to the third round and the 2006 Edmonton Oilers to the
Stanley Cup Final in a pair of Cinderella narratives. At age forty-one, he was
keen on taking the last step with the Tampa Bay Lighting, but the
thirty-seven-year-old Tim Thomas and the Bruins got the better of him in a
memorable seven-game series, culminating in a penalty-free, 1-0 Game 7 triumph
at the TD Garden.
By AHL standards, Roloson was a veteran of
the highest order in 2001. He had professional seven seasons under his belt,
beginning with the Saint John Flames in 1994. He had been on a three-round run
with the Baby Flames in the 1996 Calder Cup playoffs. He had seen NHL action in
both Calgary and Buffalo, including four playoff games in 1999 when the
otherworldly Dominik Hasek was out of commission.
His only season with Worcester was the
first that Roloson spent predominantly in the minors since 1995-96. He was sure
to make it his last by retaining a 2.17 goals-against average and .927 save
percentage through fifty-two regular-season games. Thanks in no small part to
him, the IceCats defense finished first in the Eastern Conference and a narrow
second in the entire AHL with only 205 goals allowed.
But with Boston out of the Stanley Cup derby,
the Bruins were able to present their own seasoned stopper in John Grahame. On
the heels of his second back-and-forth campaign between Boston and Providence,
the twenty-five-year-old, fourth-year professional was a deciding factor in the
first-round ouster of Hartford. For the next phase of what would likewise prove
to be his last go-round in the AHL, he would engage the thirty-one-year-old
Roloson in a multi-round staring contest.
The first round at the Worcester Centrum,
conducted on Saturday, April 21, went the way of Grahame, who posted a 2-0
shutout. Game 2 was less than twenty-four hours later at the same site, which
left as little time as possible for heating tempers to cool.
The first three penalties of Game 2 were
roughing minors, including coincidental calls on Grahame and Worcester winger
Doug Friedman at 4:02 of the first period. A rare postseason scrap broke out at
the 8:53 mark, with Bruin Keith McCambridge drawing a combined nine penalty
minutes for roughing, interference and fighting and IceCat Trevor Gillies being
cited for instigating and incurring a ten-minute misconduct along with the
standard five-minute major. One more roughing minor, plus four calls for
slashing, two for high-sticking and one apiece for charging and boarding were
among those doled out by night’s end.
As for the genuine hockey action, the host
mustered one unanswered goal in each of the first two stanzas, but the Bruins
burst out in the third, sandwiching Worcester’s third strike with two pairs of
their own. With the 4-3 triumph, Providence had stolen two contests from the
top-seeded team’s domain and went back to the Civic Center salivating for a
sweep.
But the IceCats found their fangs up
front, and Roloson returned Grahame’s favor by breaking the vocal cords of the
Civic Center masses with his trapper mitt. His and Worcester’s 5-0 shutout in
Game 3 restored the New England Division final’s certificate as a series. He
proceeded to allow a mere three goals over the next two games while his mates
found the cage seven times. With that, Grahame needed to find his second wind
ahead of his team’s fourth elimination game of the spring, held in Providence
on a Monday night, April 30.
In terms of individual game
comparisons, Game 6 of the 2001 Providence-Worcester set was as close as
Grahame would get to experiencing what Thomas did versus Roloson in Game 7 of
the 2011 Boston-Tampa Bay epic. In the sixteenth minute of the first period,
Roloson repelled rookie defenseman Nick Boynton’s bid. But former IceCat
Marquis Mathieu was lying in wait and backhanded the loose biscuit as Roloson
reached back with his blocker too late.
Roloson would rue that error all the
more when his skating mates let Providence test him a mere ten times over the
course of the second and third periods. He handled the light load, but
Worcester thrust seventeen (nearly half of its night’s total of thirty-five)
shots at Grahame in the middle frame to no avail. The Bruins’ Colorado cucumber
was in definitive shape through that tempest and again in the third. The
skilled IceCats were on ample display, but never got on the board in Game 6.
Grahame’s second shutout of the series stretched it to the rubber match less
than twenty-four hours later back in Worcester.
Though the Cats finally solved him
for first blood and a 2-2 equalizer, Grahame gave an identical thirty-five-save
effort in Game 7. Roloson matched that mark, but could not recover before
Jeremy Brown ended the seesaw game and series by poking home the clincher
amidst a frenzy on the Worcester porch in the thirteenth minute of overtime.
For the second time in their history, the IceCats had finished first in the New
England Division and pushed the pesky P-Bruins to the brink, only to lose the
rubber game at the Centrum with a visiting skater burying the puck on the last
play.
Eight years would pass before
Providence engaged Worcester in another Calder Cup playoff series, and ample
change took effect in the interim. In the summer of 2001, the Civic Center
submitted to the corporate bug and was renamed the Dunkin Donuts Center. Three
years later, the Centrum followed suit, reemerging as the DCU Center. The
IceCats played less than a full season in the renamed building before the
parent St. Louis Blues pulled them closer to home in Peoria, Illinois. They
were soon replaced by San Jose’s feeder club, the Worcester Sharks.
The protracted playoff-free
interlude and complete franchise replacement in Worcester did little to
diminish the feud. In 2002-03, hockeyfights.com recorded sixty-one P-Bruins
fights, nine of which came against Worcester. In addition, as one of the few
lowlights of one-year wonder Mike Sullivan’s Providence coaching tenure, the
IceCats enjoyed a record-setting 11-0 home drubbing of the black and gold two
nights post-Thanksgiving.
The next year, each of the P-Bruins’
first four fights of 2003-04 involved an IceCat, as would thirteen out of 101
by season’s end. The Cats met the Bruins for ten games in their final year of
operation in 2004-05. The first of those ten meetings included three scraps,
and the last one ever included a pair of pugilistic interruptions.
And while there would be no more
bona fide Bruins-IceCats playoff encounters, their final regular-season series
culminated in a situation rife with playoff implications. In the process, old
patterns repeated themselves and gave Worcester a not-so-pleasant going-away
present.
Not unlike in 1996-97, the IceCats
started 2004-05 with a one-sided head-to-head upper hand against Providence.
They won the first of ten matches at The Dunk in overtime, took a 5-2 decision
at home, then a shootout and regulation victory by identical 2-1 scores. With
another 5-1 home triumph on March 12, they improved to 5-1-0 in the matchup,
which was proving vital to sustaining their hopes for a playoff spot.
But with spring came a late
turnaround for the Bruins, who were no sure thing for the postseason themselves
as the homestretch heated up. They won a pair of get-togethers in the final
week of March, then entered the final weekend of the regular season needing a
single victory to clinch their berth. Going into their Friday, April 15 tilt,
the first installment of a home-and-home series, the IceCats needed to win out
to preserve their playoff ambitions.
In classic Bruins-IceCats fashion,
Worcester drew first blood at The Dunk that night. But Martin Samuelsson led a
rally with two assists amidst three unanswered home goals. When the horn
finalized the 3-1 difference, Providence had simultaneously secured its spot in
the bracket while punching the IceCats out of the run one last time.
Twenty-four hours later at the DCU
Center, playing for pride at this point, the Cats salvaged one last memory for
their home crowd by battering the B’s, 5-2. A 2-1 loss to first-place Manchester
the next day constituted the building’s last pro hockey game for the next
eighteen months.
After a year’s absence from the AHL,
Worcester’s new personnel and a new brand did nothing to alleviate the Rhode
Island rancor. The Dunk drew a crowd of 9,440 on Friday, October 13, 2006, for
the home opener of the P-Bruins’ fifteenth anniversary season and the
franchise’s first look at the Sharks. During a 3-1 Providence victory that
night, home scrapper Jeremy Reich dropped the gloves with Brad Staubitz.
By season’s end, the new acquaintances had
accounted for thirteen fights in twelve games. In that twelfth contest, the
first of two tussles began on a play in which the usually placid David Krejci
incurred a five-minute major for boarding. Providence’s Petr Kalus subsequently
got sideways with Torrey Mitchell, who would be ejected on the play for a
jersey violation six minutes after Bruins forward T.J. Trevelyan got the gate
for hitting from behind.
Familiarity develops fast among AHL
New England teams, and the nine years of the Providence Bruins-Worcester Sharks
matchup lends credence to the adage that familiarity breeds contempt. The
franchises crossed paths for 102 regular-season games and chalked up
ninety-five skirmishes in that span, including a whopping nineteen in the
2011-12 season series.
The lone playoff series between the
Baby B’s and Baby Sharks, which lasted six games in 2009’s second round,
featured four fights, all on separate nights. Providence set the tone with a
3-2 home overtime victory in Game 1, which started with Worcester’s Frazer
MacLaren and Providence’s Jordan Knackstedt drawing coincidental minors for
unsportsmanlike conduct at the one-second mark of regulation. But between that
and various building conflicts that made for a strange eight-day gap, the young
stages of the series went largely without incident. Other than a pair of
coincidental roughing minors midway through the middle frame, Game 2 in
Worcester saw nothing ugly when it was still in the balance.
Everything changed in the final
minute of an eventual Bruins victory. With forty seconds left, Wacey Rabbit
converted Reich’s pass and fed the empty net to stamp the 4-2 final. At the
same point, Bruins center Vladimir Sobotka and Sharks winger Jamie McGinn
incurred coincidental ten-minute misconducts. Twenty-seven seconds later, a
proliferation of pugnacity ended with a pair of ten-minute misconducts, one
roughing minor and one fighting major (MacLaren for Worcester, Kirk MacDonald
for Providence) on each side.
The series shifted back to The Dunk
for Game 3, where the Sharks channeled their 2001 ancestors and got back in
contention with a 5-3 triumph. And once again, the last minute saw the bubble
burst on everyone’s temper. With precisely one minute on the clock, and with
Worcester safeguarding a 4-2 lead, eight skaters combined for thirteen
infractions and sixty-one penalty minutes. The second fight of the series
pitted P-Bruins blueliner Johnny Boychuk against Sharks rearguard Mike Moore.
The thirteenth and extra infraction went to McGinn for slashing, giving
Providence the power play. Mikko Lehtonen subsequently converted that
man-advantage to cut the deficit to 4-3, offering momentary hope of an
emotional rally en route to a commanding 3-0 lead in the series. But Riley
Armstrong put the game away on an empty netter.
Back in Worcester the next night, on
the heels of allowing four goals on twenty-six shots, Bruins backstop Tuukka
Rask had the frustrating fortune of seeing opponent Thomas Greiss on top of his
game at the other end. The only goal of Game 4 would come off the stick of the
late Rhode Island native Tom Cavanagh for the Sharks in the fifth minute of
regulation. Rask repelled the rest of Worcester’s thirteen first-period shots
and all ten and three in the middle and closing frame, respectively. In
between, he watched Sobotka fight McGinn while stay-at-home defenseman Adam
McQuaid joined Brett Westgarth on coincidental ten-minute misconducts. And he
himself logged a pair of penalty minutes for delay of game.
Precisely fifty nights before Game
4, Rask had gone viral for slamming his stick against the boards and heaving a
puck crate over the glass from the runway after a controversial call gave the
Albany River Rats a shootout victory at The Dunk. After his skating mates
outshot the Sharks, 13-3, in the third period, but failed to prevent another
1-0 loss, his temper boiled over again. Cutting to the direction of his bench
in the waning seconds, he threw a check on Cavanagh. No penalty or supplemental
discipline would be issued, and Rask went on to outduel Greiss in another
one-goal decision, 4-3, in the pivotal and fight-free Game 5 back home.
With a chance to shut the door, Rask
kept a cooler held in hostile territory. The closest the Sharks came to him in
the first two periods of Game 6 was through a pair of penalties for goaltender
interference. At the other end, the Bruins scored four unanswered goals before
Worcester’s Riley Armstrong represented his team’s
desperation-turned-frustration, drawing himself a pair of game misconducts for
boarding and spearing. The same incident saw Reich and Staubitz square off,
then go off for five minutes themselves.
On its prolonged, all-you-can-score
power-play buffer, Providence raised a 5-0 upper hand, but also spoiled Rask’s
shutout through a shorthanded Sharks tally in the final minute of the middle
frame. It didn’t matter. Rask repelled all eleven Worcester shots in the third
period, holding up the 5-1 difference and clinching the series.
For the fourth, and as yet final
time in as many tries, the Baby B’s had dispatched a foe from Worcester in the
playoffs, and had ended the series on the road to boot. They never had another
postseason encounter with the Sharks, who in 2015 moved out to California,
where they have since operated as the San Jose Barracuda.
Overall, between the IceCats and the
Sharks, the P-Bruins have won 103 regular-season games against Worcester, lost
100 and tied thirteen. If you ignore the distinctions between regulation and
overtime or shootout losses, the IceCats owned their all-time regular-season
series with Providence by a record of 54-47-13. The B’s won fifty-six matches
with the Sharks and lost forty-six.
The three playoff triumphs over the
IceCats comprise a naturally favorable tradeoff for the Providence faithful.
But both Worcester teams won their final individual tilt with the black and
gold. The Cats took a 5-2 decision from the DCU Center on April 16, 2005, giving
them a final 6-4-0 edge in their last season series. The Sharks claimed an
identical score before a home audience of 8,739 on April 17, 2015. That stopped
a three-game head-to-head losing skid and cemented an 8-4-0 advantage in their
final season series with the Spoked-Ps.
Still, just like the Cats, the
Sharks never solved their rivals from south of the border in the second season.
While they have the fresher taste of victory, the Bruins are left with the
bolder flavor from their collision chronicles.
As Stephen Eide might conclude, the
playoffs, not the regular season, should carry more weight in the debate. As
such, at least through two eras, Providence has the AHL bragging-rights
advantage over Worcester.
Whether this rivalry will have a
charming third iteration remains to be seen. Starting in 2017-18, the DCU
Center will house an ECHL franchise, Worcester Railers HC. Just like the
IceCats in their early days, they will function as a New York Islanders
affiliate. Meanwhile, the Atlanta Gladiators remain Boston’s Double-A hockey
ally.
But could there one day be a little
shuffling that brings these two big brothers from New England’s geographic
family into Papa Bruin’s bear den in Boston? Could there ultimately come a day
when Rhode Islanders and Worcesterians travel up and down Route 146 to take in
a game at each other’s arena, root for tomorrow’s Spoked-Bs together at one
level or the other and look back and laugh at their bygone era of rancor?
A fan (and even an ex-fan) can
dream.
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