Sliding up one: Providence pregame

Home-and-home finishes up with a different goalie matchup; Anders Nilsson and Niklas Svedberg play to start this weekend after sitting out to end last weekend.

Some tweaks in the Bruins lineup. The big tweak in the Bridgeport lineup of “one whole line missing,” of course; the newbies and Joey Diamond step in. There’s another minor tweak: Andrew Clark took the rushes at center with Alan Quine on the left. One to scratch for Bridgeport.

BRIDGEPORT
F: Broda-Sundstrom (A)-Pistilli
Quine-A.Clark-Persson
Mercier-Martin-Diamond
Gallant (A)-Langkow-Vaughan
D: Ness (A)-Mayfield
Finley-Donovan
Pedan-Jackson
(Newton-scratch)
G: Nilsson
Reiter

PROVIDENCE
F: Florek (A)-Khokhlachev-Griffith
Knight-Spooner-Cunningham (A)
Camara-Lindblad-Robins
Flick-Campbell-Randell
D: Warsofsky-Parlett
Moore (C)-Casto
Cross-Youds
G: Svedberg
Subban

R: Lemelin, Mayer. L: Ross, T.Whittemore.

Providence’s warmups don’t have the letters; I’m going with Sunday’s for now.

For entertainment purposes: SportsClubStats had Bridgeport’s playoff chances (going into Thursday) up to 2.254 percent, or one crazy simulation in 44. One game into this 11-outta-13, it was something that rounded to 0.1 percent, or one crazy simulation in about 1,000. That’s more or less going from “guess the player under NHL contract I’m thinking of (we’ll eliminate a few teams to help you)” to “guess the player under Islanders contract I’m thinking of.” Still crazy, but somewhat less so.

Michael Fornabaio