Saving grace: Springfield postgame

His final 19 save total may not hop off the scoresheet at you, but Eamon McAdam made some key stops in the first period, when the Thunderbirds threatened to take control.

“We got some key saves when we needed. The guys made some blocks,” Brent Thompson said.

For McAdam, that’s four wins in the past four games

“It’s confidence, confidence in the team, and I think their confidence in me is growing,” McAdam said. “We’re on the same page, whether it’s communication with the D, making plays, clearing in front, just little things.”

There were clears from both Kyle Burroughs and Kane Lafranchise in key spots. McAdam stopped all but one shot (that one looked weird, and it was: Thomas Schemitsch’s shot tipped off Bracken Kearns’ stick, and McAdam said he still had a line on it after that, but then it skipped off the ice and went away from him). Outside of a breakaway in the third period on which Paul Thompson hit a post, McAdam had to stop but eight shots in the last 40 minutes.

“I don’t think we gave a whole lot up. We didn’t play a lot in our zone,” Pulock said. “We’ve got to keep doing it every shift, keep it simple.”

……

Every time I grumbled to myself about the 7,000 screaming kids at 11 a.m., I reminded myself that Parker Wotherspoon was dealing with the same 7,000 screaming kids, only to him it felt like 8 a.m. He disappointed me by saying he was in the room for about half the game, so he didn’t get the full screaming-kid experience. Ah well. We’ll bug him more later in the week.

Thompson dropped the possibility of playing seven defensemen at some point. We might explore that later in the week, too.

The ice was bad yesterday and bad again today. Talk of the dressing room. “You saw how sloppy the game was: One, puck decisions, yes, but a big factor was how poor the ice was,” Thompson said. “Any time you have bad ice, you can’t execute a pass. You’ve got to simplify.”

Some did that better than others, he said. He liked the way Jake Bischoff did that, on his goal in particular.

“We did a better job in the third period,” Thompson said. “The key was we were more physically engaged. We made better puck decisions.”

Line swap in the second period; I’d thought it might just be because Ross Johnston was still serving his misconduct to start the second, but they stuck. Stevens-Holmstrom-Holmstrom, Dal Colle-Nowick-Jones, Johnston-Winquist-Wallace. Johnston received what seemed like a generous double minor for roughing after he threw several gloved punches at Tony Turgeon. (There doesn’t appear to be anything in Rule 46 that says it’s not a fight if you keep your gloves on, but that’s at the referees’ discretion.)

Travis St. Denis in warmup? “Just to get him on the ice,” Thompson said. “We had no ice available. We wanted to get him a skate.” Thompson said St. Denis is still a week away; I’ll be interested to see how the next couple of days go. (Optional tomorrow, so the blog is, too, right? We’ll see.)

The Sound Tigers’ magic number is eight. The earliest possible clinch is Saturday; they can’t be eliminated before the second-to-last game of the year on April 14.

The city’s starting over on those Ballpark at Harbor Yard operations bids.

Phil Kemp of Greenwich is on the Under-18 national team that’ll take part in the worlds later this month, and former Sound Tiger Greg Moore is on the coaching staff.

And RIP, Elizabeth M. Pfriem, Red McDonough and Fern Tetreau.

Michael Fornabaio