First things first: Kyle Burroughs will be out “a while,” Brent Thompson said, after suffering an upper-body injury trying to stop Adam Tambellini on what became Hartford’s third goal last night. Tough break for a young kid who’d become a big piece of the puzzle here. Patrick Cullity goes into his spot next to Devon Toews.
A few other changes to end the three-in-four as first-place Wilkes-Barre/Scranton comes in for the first time. A Sound Tigers-Penguins game always calls to mind the old days and the semi-improbable rivalry of the last decade, when these teams seemed to meet every other April for five to seven games (usually five) and would play wild regular-season games, too (and sometimes wild warmups).
The old days also come to mind today as Raffi Torres makes his retirement official. Injuries didn’t let him perform to his fullest anymore — 35’s not a bad run — and his several repeat-offender suspensions cost him lots of time the past few years. But we’ll always remember the hard-hitting kid who chipped in offensively; who had points in 11 consecutive playoff games in 2002; who scored the goal that looked like it’d send Bridgeport to the Calder Cup Final, then two nights later scored the goal that did; who was always good for hauling a teammate out of the back for an interview; who found out he was traded (to wind up with the Hamilton team he eliminated a year before) while he was walking through a mall, an hour before the teams called him; who went on to another Calder Cup Final that year, then a Stanley Cup Final two years later.
Think it’s safe to say most of the hockey world will remember him differently than we will, but it happens.
BRIDGEPORT
F: Verhaeghe-Kearns (A)-Bernier
Dal Colle – Fritz – Ho-Sang
Johnston-St. Denis-B.Holmstrom (C)
K.Jones-C.Jones-J.Holmstrom
(Rowe-scratch)
D: Pelech-Mayfield (A)
Toews-Cullity
Lafranchise-Leduc
G: Williams
Gibson
WILKES-BARRE/SCRANTON
F: Guentzel-Rowney (A)-Kostopoulos (C)
Simon-Porter-Gardiner
Wilson-Sundqvist-Archibald
Gill-Dea-McGrath
D: McNeill-Ruhwedel
Erixon-Oleksy (A)
Gaunce-Prow
(Goers-scratch)
G: DeSmith
Jarry
R: Iverson. L: Pincus, Colby.
Bridgeport scratches (believed healthy unless noted): Burroughs (upper body), Landry, Boulton, Gionta (lower body), Markison (lower body), apparently Rowe, Winquist.
First Bridgeport game for referee Brett Iverson, by one poll best ref in the WHL last year. And yes, that’s Brett with Brian and Brent.
An aside Raffi Torres story. One day in ’01-02 I’m waiting to go into the dressing room after a game in Lowell, and a guy asks me if Torres is still around. We chat a little, and he turns out to be Mike Zigomanis’ dad. Who then drops on me that Mike and Raffi grew up with a kid named Hayden Christensen. We are, at this point, a few months away from the mid-May release of “Attack of the Clones,” and Christensen, you may remember, had kind of a big part in that. I tucked that one away, figuring, ehh, maybe at some point drop that in a notebook. I never did… Until the day the movie opened, when the Sound Tigers were still playing, and on the off day between Games 3 and 4 in Hamilton, I got to write this lead to a note: “When Sound Tigers’ left winger Raffi Torres was a kid, he used to go to Darth Vader’s birthday parties. Well, sort of.”