Taking it 15 goals at a time

The AHL has had two 8-7 games since Saturday: Rochester-Hershey and tonight’s overtime-aided Portland-St. John’s wild one, whose reporting to the outside world was hampered by Internet issues. As noted on the Twitter, Bridgeport has never had a game go beyond 12 combined goals. The first was one of the House of Pain games, and the second was the night we started blogging like a madman*. Both were aided by empty-netters.

Pretty wild stuff, and if you’re like me you start to wonder if the batters are somehow ahead of the pitchers or something like that**. Not really. Going into tonight, in the first 10 days of the season, AHL teams had scored 362 regulation-time goals in 63 games, or 5.75 combined per game. (They’d added 12 in OT or shootouts.) But, if you go back to last year and the first 14 days of the season, in 63 games, AHL teams had combined for 386 goals (plus 13 in OT/bonus round), or 6.13. (this jumps out as one that probably helped.) Even adding in tonight, 12 days into the season (which evens out the OT/SO goals at 13), teams had scored only one more goal combined than they had through two weeks last year, in three more games, averaging 5.86 instead of that 6.13.

So maybe they’re just bunched up.

Less county/arithmeticky, Justin Cohn on Kenny Reiter in Fort Wayne.

As seen in the chat: Goals for Groceries.

Worcester will play its games this weekend without Matt Pelech, suspended four games for leaving the bench to start an altercation. (Pete Dougherty has more.) Chris Kreider also got a game for a boarding penalty Friday on Brandon McMillan.

And finally, big computer operating-system and software company, if you’re gonna count down and repeat “eight” over and over, I’m gonna be thinking about this and ignore the rest of your commercial.

*-I’m not sure anyone told me they liked the lineups, but they didn’t go away.
**-If you’re like me, you also wonder when the last time was that two Original 16 teams met in the World Series for the first time. That appears to be 1991, Boston/Milwaukee/Atlanta vs. Washington/Minnesota. By the way, checking on that reminds me we never noted here the passing last week of Eddie Yost. RIP.

Michael Fornabaio