Last night ended the second-longest Bridgeport drought without a shutout, 59 games, 315 days since David Leggio needed all of 19 saves two days after last Christmas to blank a WBS Penguins team that was annihilated by injury. (The remainder of his Bridgeport career: 4.26 GAA, .843 save percentage. But anyway.) The longest lasted 91 games, 400 days, before Kevin Poulin shut out Worcester here two days into 2012, the first of three shutouts in a row over six days.
For the sake of curiosity, Bridgeport’s hat-trick drought now is even longer than that. The Sound Tigers didn’t have a hat trick last season for the first time in team history, and the last one is John Persson’s against Syracuse on Jan. 26, 2014, 120 games and 651 days ago. It’s only the third time such a gap lasted more than a year.
Total curiosity, obviously, while this team actually keeps winning at such a clip. They’ll try to keep it going with, apparently, the same lineup tonight except for the goaltender.
If you did want to tie it all together, though: The guy who has more hat tricks for the home team than anyone else is Jeff Tambellini, with three. There’ll be a Tambellini in No. 7 on the other team tonight, skating on this rink for the first time as a pro.
Both have one to scratch off warmup, but Bridgeport’s looked like Gomes. Hartford ran all seven defensemen.
BRIDGEPORT
F: Whitney-Kearns-Collberg
Halmo (A)-Quine-Strome
Vaive-Wright-Holmstrom (C)
Johnston-Verhaeghe-Florek
(Gomes-scratch)
D: Pelech-Mayfield
Czuczman-Pulock
Carkner (A)-Graham
G: Gibson
Williams
HARTFORD
F: Tambellini-Megna-Glass
Brown-Hrivik (A)-Bourque (C)
Nejezchleb-Oleksuk-O’Donnell
Tarnasky-Nehring-McCarthy
D: Skjei-Diaz
Graves-Bodie
Summers (A)-Zamorsky
(Andersson-scratch)
G: Hellberg
Malcolm
R: Lambert, MacDougall. L: Simeon, Giorgio.
Bridgeport scratches: Leduc (healthy), C. Jones (healthy), Petrov (broken left foot), and one more (if Gomes, healthy)
The sound system is down, among some other IT issues, here in the pregame. They’re working on it. Very quiet warmup, though.
Elsewhere, is in today for the Big Club.