Moments: Hartford postgame

There wasn’t much going at the start. “Desperation” and “urgency” may’ve made an appearance in the notebook, in the sense that there didn’t seem to be a lot.

I thought they picked up a little. Brent Thompson wasn’t so sure about that.

“I thought in the second period we made a push. We finished hits. We generated some zone time,” Thompson said. “But not nearly enough. We didn’t compete hard enough, plain and simple, 60 minutes. It’s really that simple.”

Coming off a Binghamton game where they “laid an egg,” in his words earlier this week, with the Utica win in the middle, it’s tough times, or at least as tough as times can get for a team that still has the second-most points in the AHL at this writing, even if they’ve plummeted, as it were, to sixth overall in percentage.

They’ll get a chance to clean it up against their next opponent, surely a non-skilled, non-speedy middle-of-the-pack (/checks schedule) welp.

….

Thompson thinks Christopher Gibson will be good to go on the Charlotte trip, but he said he’s not expecting anybody else back. They’re not announcing any transactions tonight. A suspension to Steve Bernier for what was called a Rule-48 match penalty tonight would allow Ryan Bourque back in, as the veterans stand.

It was, at times, a physical game, or at least there were guys throwing some hits. Tanner Fritz nailed each of the guys on the Gilmour-Lindgren pair once in the first period. “We don’t like playing these guys,” he said. “That (physical play) is what makes our team successful. We’re not a pretty team that’s going to pass around every other team. We’ve got to play physical, play hard, in-your-face hockey. That’s when we have the most success. From our top guys to our bottom guys, we didn’t have that consistently tonight. That’s the reason we didn’t come out on top.”

Worcester won on Mitch Gillam Bobblehead Night. Speaking of guys called up to Bridgeport, Josh Holmstrom wore the ‘C’ with Mike Cornell here, so both brothers had it tonight.

500 points for Trevor Smith.

And Sacred Heart took a lead at Ingalls, but Yale came back to win 3-1 in the game honoring Jason Pagni.

The Sound Tigers won’t skate here again until Friday; working on getting here for that, but more as it comes in the meantime.

Michael Fornabaio