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Regional Rivalries: Providence vs. Hartford

If you count playoff games, Hartford and Providence logged precisely 200 meaningful matchups against one another in their first two decades of simultaneous AHL membership, beginning with the Wolf Pack’s 1997 debut. In the P-Bruins’ first twenty-five years of operation and the Wolf Pack/Connecticut Whale’s first twenty, the two teams have been each other’s most frequent postseason opponents. Together, they have aggregated twenty-eight Calder Cup contests, including four winner-take-all tilts, in five series. Each team has won two of those mutual do-or-die games. Each team defeated the other on its road to its first respective championship, hosted the other on its banner-raising night the next fall and then met the end of its title defense in a rematch the next spring.             That history, however, is only the whipped cream and syrup on the rivalry sundae. Every element of this pairing made it a magnet for mutual rancor a...
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Star Power

On February 8, 2012, amidst their twentieth anniversary season, the Providence Bruins received a hard-earned present in the form of All-Star hospitality privileges for the next winter. The selection quickly ended a one-year practice of hosting the AHL’s midseason showcase in a non-league market. The 2012 All-Star Classic took place in Atlantic City, New Jersey, which was briefly a home away from home for the Albany Devils, but had otherwise not hosted pro hockey since the ECHL’s Boardwalk Bullies left in 2005. At the formal press conference to announce the event, Rhode Island Convention Center Authority chairman and CEO Jim Bennett noted that mayor Angel Taveras had arisen at four o’clock in the morning and made the trek to Atlantic City to personally pitch Providence as the next host to the league’s assembled owners. Within ten days of the 2012 event’s conclusion, the plans were in place for many stimulating returns. Besides returning the event to one of the league’s full-tim...
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Comeback Cubs

In each odd-numbered year spanning 1997 to 2003, two New England sports entities took turns showing a knack for surmounting a two-games-to-none deficit in a best-of-five playoff series. The Boston Red Sox pulled the relatively rare feat in 1999 and 2003 against the Cleveland Indians and Oakland Athletics, respectively. Only six Major League Baseballteams have done this in the first twenty-three years of the division series, and Boston is the only franchise to have produced two of those teams.             But two-and-a-half years before the BoSox did it the first time, the Providence Bruins became only the sixth team in American Hockey League history to do the same. Two-and-a-half years before the Sox did it again, another edition of the P-Bruins became the eighth AHL team to pull such a rally. And in 2013, yet another score of Spoked-P skaters became the tenth.           ...
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