Must be an interesting night when you score four in the first and your goalie is first star. The Wings tied the series with a 4-1 win, chasing Wheeling starter Peter Delmas. Justin Taylor had a goal (his eighth) and an assist, and Jon Landry had two assists. The series goes to West Virginia for the next three, beginning Thursday.
Speaking of getting back in it: Staring down a 3-0 hole, Portland tied it in the third on a Derek Whitmore goal, then Tim Conboy — Tim Conboy?!* — scored with 12.5 seconds left in regulation to make it a series against Binghamton. Conboy hadn’t scored since Jan. 17, 2009. Conboy had played 117 AHL regular-season games, another 16 AHL playoff games, 35 NHL regular-season games and three NHL playoff games since then without a goal. They don’t get a heck of a lot bigger than that. (Moments after I finished counting on Conboy’s ’08-09 NHL game log, I put it in a tweet… and discovered that @TheAHL had published first. Curses.)
Some lineup changes for Wilkes-Barre helped the Pens beat Charlotte 3-0 and head to North Carolina with a tied series. Brad Thiessen had 34 saves. Two tweets sum up Jonathan’s experience (Vinnerborg/R.Fraser).
A big upset at the World Championships — and, fortunately for us around here, it wasn’t the U.S., which took advantage of suspect goaltending to pull away from Austria (a point for Darien’s Ryan Shannon). No, it was Sweden going down in a shootout to Norway, blowing leads of 1-0, 3-1 and 4-3 along the way. Two assists for Robert Nilsson in defeat, though. Slightly more to form, the Czechs beat Latvia, though they had to come from behind twice to do it (and Radek Martinek took an ugly hit along the way). Finland beat Norway handily; Jesse Joensuu didn’t dress, but Petteri Nokelainen had an assist.
Theoretically, the most interesting game Sunday is Slovakia-Germany. But there haven’t been many blowouts so far, and Germany and Norway have tossed in some big wins that upended the world rankings. (The unofficial daily power rankings are usually good for a laugh.)
As Ray noted, Jeremy Reich is off to Germany, ERC Ingolstadt (as is former Phantoms captain Jared Ross). They’re playing in Europe for the first time.
On to May, a month in which Bridgeport has not played since 2003.
*-It’s almost nine years later, and I still have a hard time writing Louie DeBrusk’s — Louie DeBrusk’s?! — name without doing the same thing.