Come for the trivia, stay for the note from practice (in front of a couple of Jersey high school teams) embedded within…
The once and future coach, Brent Thompson, returned to Bridgeport this year, which calls to mind nonconsecutive things of all sorts.
1) A number of Sound Tigers have had nonconsecutive Bridgeport careers, been away for a year or two and come back. Rick DiPietro went almost six years between appearances, his brief stint at New Year’s 2003-04 to his rehab stint in December 2009. Which skater has the longest gap between turns in a Sound Tigers sweater?
2) Of those players whose gap is more than one season, who has played the most games for Bridgeport overall?
3) Who’s the only player aside from DiPietro who has two gaps — played a year, missed a year, played a year, missed a year, played a year?
4) Aaron Ness is the 11th Bridgeport Sound Tiger to serve as team captain. (His 29 games played with the ‘C’ are already sixth most, but that was a trivia question from another year.) Ness played 206 games for Bridgeport before being named captain. Who’s the only one to have played more games with that cat on his shirt before getting a ‘C’ above it?
5) There are no, technically, nonconsecutive captaincies for Bridgeport. There is only one Bridgeport captain to be called up and sent back down, keeping the ‘C’ when he returned. Name him.
6) How many of those 11 captains have played games without the ‘C’ after serving as captain?
7) Hey, I promised a note from practice: Colton Gillies skated, took the whole thing; Thompson was hopeful Gillies and John Persson will be available this weekend. Back to trivia. Abandoning the theme — well, they did play here in nonconsecutive seasons — Gillies became the third man with that last name to play for Bridgeport, though not related to the other two. I wondered: What surname has appeared on the back of a Sound Tigers sweater in the most games?
8) Your annual calendar-year scoring question: Who had the most points for Bridgeport in 2014?
9) Who led the team in scoring in just the 2014 portion of last season — that is, January to April?
And finally, easily enough:
10) Name the 65 players who appeared for Bridgeport in 2013-14. (As a bonus, not in the quiz below, name the man who backed up one night only in Manchester.) (There is one set of two players with the same last name — for them, you must include the full name, like “Andrew MacDonald.” For others, last name is fine.)
If the embed fails you, you can try it here. (I had literally just inputted the quiz and was testing it out… I missed five. Sixty-five is a big number.)
Good luck. Answers tomorrow, most likely. And happy new year.