Thursday practice: Putting it together

A pretty hard practice today; so hard that I thought for a moment Marc Cantin might be injured on a bump from behind from Joey Diamond. He got up looking sore but OK.

“We have to be able to do all that we do in practice and execute it in a game,” Scott Pellerin said. He felt that last night was fairly successful structurally; it was a matter of getting stronger individual play within that structure. Avoiding turnovers (he thought they had one in the neutral zone all night — that turned into Micheal Haley’s goal). Making a save, better stick position, better coverage. “Once our guys believe in themselves, when we can get that recovery, get that second-effort to recover from those mistakes, we’re going to start playing our game.”

Same cast of characters; the top two lines were the same, with some tweaks to the others. We’ll see how they look tomorrow, though there’s no ice (a tournament at the Wonderland of Ice and something going on at Webster Bank Arena), so they’ll just have meetings rather than a regular morning skate.

Pellerin said Chris Bruton’s surgery was termed a success. The captain was hurting today so was resting at home. Awaiting news on Joe Finley’s status.

The Sound Tigers are 0-3 on nights when the Red Sox win the World Series. (2004; 2007, with 876 of our closest friends; and last night.) We can go one better: They’re 1-5-1-1 on nights the World Series is decided, winless in the past seven. (They won at Wilkes-Barre in 2003, when the Marlins beat the Yanks; they lost in a shootout in Providence in 2006, when the Cards beat the Tigers; they lost in the morning to Adirondack in 2009 before the Yanks beat the Phillies; they lost to Worcester at home in overtime in 2011 while the Cardinals were beating the Rangers; and they lost at Worcester last year before beating the hurricane home.) Clearly*, there’s something at work here; poor scheduling. (*-not clearly at all) And since it was the bottom of the eighth when I left Hartford last night, tip of cap to the Sox, who represented their (blank)in’ city to the fullest. (So they finally started walking the guy who said that back in April? And it cost ’em, anyway? Impressive.)

Manny Malhotra, who’d been on a PTO in Charlotte, signed with the Hurricanes today.

And this Semyon Varlamov story is pretty sordid, one way or the other.

Michael Fornabaio