The comfort level is good for Ryan Pulock, he said after this fine 142-minute piece of entertainment.
“You get your legs under you, you just play,” said Pulock, who’s got a five-point weekend with one game to play. “The confidence builds, you get that confidence, and you make those plays you don’t make when you don’t have that confidence.”
He has gotten chances off patience, he said. Points have come with that.
“He’s really finding his stride,” Brent Thompson said. “He’s got to work on that assertiveness, jumping.
“He’s had back-to-back solid, solid performances, both ways as far as offensively and defensively.”
Three of those five points this weekend have come on the power play. The man advantage has a goal in 10 of the past 11 games now (almost literally: Last night was the first with two). Before this stretch, it was 14-for-101, 13.9 percent; it’s 11-for-the-past-52, 21.2 percent. The former percentage would rank 27th right now. The latter would rank ninth.
“Shoot the puck,” Thompson said. “Net presence, and shoot the puck. At the end of the day, we didn’t do anything different.”
It and Pulock have come up big. They’re suddenly within the games-in-hand margin of catching Hershey. The actual second half starts tomorrow against Rochester.
…..
A little sloppy in the second period, said Thompson, though no shots got through until over nine minutes into the period, and then two got through to the back of the net; “we were swinging,” he said. He credited the veterans for calming things down and getting things back in order in the third. We’ve heard that a time or two before in the first half.
Jones-Jones-Markison impressed again: “They were good,” Thompson said. “They were solid defensively.” In the last 10 minutes or so, though, Bridgeport cut down to nine forwards, leaving three in a row numerically, St. Denis, Markison and Ho-Sang, mostly out of the rotation and putting Fritz in Markison’s place in search of a little more offense, Thompson said. He liked what he saw there, too.
Thompson said he hadn’t decided definitely on tomorrow’s lineup, including whether Michael Dal Colle would return. If I read between the lines, sounded like yes, though. His scratch leaves Bracken Kearns, Devon Toews and Ben Holmstrom (up to 114 consecutive games, plus three in the playoffs) as the only Sound Tigers to play all 38.
Strange circumstances on the Marlies’ goals, but either way you look at them, Jaroslav Halak was good down the stretch. “When he decides to shut the door,” Thompson said, “he shuts the door.” Finished with 30 saves.
Wacky streak ongoing: Bridgeport has given up three goals in each of the past five games. Not particularly where they want to be, on average, but there it is. That appears to be the longest such streak for goals against in team history. Here’s a weirder bit: That streak began on the last night of a streak in which Bridgeport scored two goals in each of five consecutive games. It appears to be the fourth time a Sound Tigers team has scored the same number of goals in five games in a row, two streaks with one goal a game in the early days, one streak of five games of three goals in a row in 2006. (Speaking of which, Dave Baseggio in the house.)
Bridgeport gave up an opponent’s first pro goal for the second game in a row: Jayce Hawryluk last night, Travis Dermott tonight. I have absolutely no way to know if that’s a first at this stage of a season, but it’s surely weird.
Prescout. It used to be fun to complain about the unbalanced schedule with the whole “Bridgeport played its first game in Rochester and has never been back” thing. If they’re gonna just show up every year — twice this time! heck, twice this homestand! — then what’s the point? I’m gonna have to hammer Grand Rapids all the time? Anyway. Justin Bailey is on an eight-game scoring streak. It’ll be good to see Justin Vaive.
Providence, what the heck. The Bruins led 9-0 in Allentown before Lehigh Valley got one late. There were 14 different Bruins with points, and until the eighth goal, no one had more than two points.
And the Columbus Cottonmouths got back to work tonight. They lost in overtime in Peoria, but a couple of days after their bus crash, the result was kind of secondary.