The Drought turns 15: Bridgeport’s playoffs in context

The Sound Tigers last won a playoff series in 2003.

Since then, each of the other 29 franchises in the league has won at least one series. Lake Erie was the last team left ahead of them, and the Monsters won the Calder Cup in 2016. Only two franchises, San Antonio and Tucson, have gone longer without a win in a best-of-7, which Bridgeport last accomplished in the 2002 Eastern Conference Final.

The Sound Tigers have qualified for the playoffs in six of the 15 seasons since. They lost the first round in seven games in 2004 and 2006 (Wilkes-Barre/Scranton), lost in five in 2009 (WBS) and 2010 (Hershey), and were swept in three games in 2012 (Hartford, or the Connecticut Whale at the time) and 2016 (Toronto).

In 2015, with the seven moved franchises and whaddaya-do-with-Hamiltons, we gave up on the long list of Things That Had Happened Since Then in favor of shorter lists. (2016 and 2017 weren’t much help.) Hopefully the short lists put things in context, sort of.

(Worth noting: It is harder now to win a best-of-7 than it was for most of the era in question, since the first round has been best-of-5 since 2012 and only four teams can win a best-of-7 every year. Still, as of 2017, of those 24 chances, 15 different teams have done it.)

The Sound Tigers’ 15-year drought is a league record. The Springfield Indians won the Calder Cup in 1975 and in 1990, and in between the franchise didn’t win a playoff series. The Indians missed the playoffs 10 times in those 14 seasons, including the last four years, and lost four playoff series: 3-1 in 1978, 4-3 in 1981, and swept twice in best-of-7s in 1984 and 1985.

Another Springfield franchise holds another unpleasant playoff record: The Springfield Falcons missed the playoffs nine years in a row, 2003-04 to 2011-12. They are the only franchise to play nine years without winning a playoff game. This marks eight years without a playoff win for Bridgeport, in which it has gone 0-6 in the postseason. (That last playoff game victory, Game 4 vs. Hershey in 2010, ended a league-record nine-game playoff home losing streak.) The Philadelphia, Adirondack and Lehigh Valley Phantoms went eight years without a playoff-game win, getting swept in 2009 and missing the playoffs the next seven years before taking two games from Hershey last spring.

Including Charlotte, which is completing its eighth season, 53 teams have played at least eight AHL seasons, according to the histories at the back of the AHL Guide and Record Book. (That’s mostly up to them. For instance, both the new and old versions of Manitoba are treated as one franchise. The assorted Phantoms also are treated as a single franchise. The Lowell Lock Monsters are different from the Lowell Devils, who are the same as the Albany Devils, but the Binghamton Devils are different from all of them.) Of those 53, 27 have played at least 15 seasons.

Some bits that used to be footnotes:

  • The Phantoms franchise, treated as a single entity by the league, made the playoffs last year for the first time since it left Philadelphia in 2009. Its last playoff-series win was the year before.
  • As parent clubs, only Colorado (Hershey, 2002) and Phoenix (Springfield, in the old dinky best-of-3 qualifying round, earlier 2003) have longer farm-club playoff droughts than the Islanders’.
  • Rochester hasn’t won a playoff series since 2005?
  • Remember when all this used to take up, like, a paragraph in the wrap?

LAST PLAYOFF WINS
1. Bridgeport 2003. 2. Rochester 2005. 3. Lehigh Valley* (as Philadelphia) 2008. 4. Springfield Thunderbirds* (as Portland), Belleville* (as Binghamton), Laval*^ (as Hamilton – none in St. John’s), Milwaukee, Iowa* (as Houston), Charlotte 2011. 10. San Antonio, Stockton* (as Abbotsford – none in Adirondack) 2012. 12. Tucson* (as Springfield Falcons) 2013. 13. Manitoba*^ (as St. John’s), Texas 2014. 15. Hartford, Rockford, Utica, Bakersfield* (as Oklahoma City) 2015. 19. Wilkes-Barre/Scranton, Binghamton Devils* (as Albany), Ontario, Cleveland 2016. 23. Grand Rapids, Chicago, Syracuse, Toronto, Providence, Hershey, San Diego, San Jose 2017

LAST BEST-OF-7 WINS
1. San Antonio* (as Adirondack Red Wings) 1994. 2. Tucson* (as Springfield Falcons) 1997. 3. Bridgeport 2002. 4. Rochester, Binghamton Devils* (as Lowell Lock Monsters – none in Albany) 2005. 6. Lehigh Valley* (as Philadelphia), Rockford 2008. 8. Stockton* (as Abbotsford – none in Adirondack), Chicago 2010. 10. Iowa* (as Houston), Charlotte, Milwaukee, Laval*^ (as Hamilton), Springfield Thunderbirds* (as Portland), Belleville* (as Binghamton) 2011. 16. San Diego* (as Norfolk) 2012. 17. Bakersfield* (as Oklahoma City) 2013. 18. Wilkes-Barre/Scranton, Manitoba^ (as St. John’s), Texas 2014. 21. Hartford, Utica 2015. 23. Ontario, Toronto, Hershey, Cleveland 2016. 27. Grand Rapids, San Jose, Providence, Syracuse 2017

*-Has not won in current hometown
^-What’s in the list follows the moves of the actual franchises. The AHL treats some of them differently, with the IceCaps continuous, the Moose reborn after a hiatus, and the Bulldogs uninvolved. The IceCaps, under the league’s reckoning, won in St. John’s in 2014. Manitoba won in 2011, its last year before hiatus.

Michael Fornabaio