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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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Local Influence and Fan Appreciation

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 t...
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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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