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Soundin' Off -- the lifeboat

Saturday, October 14, 2006

Two minutes for inconceivable

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." --Inigo Montoya, "The Princess Bride"

Welcome to anyone who heard me plug This Space on the Sound Tigers' Webcast tonight with Phil Giubileo (and thanks to Phil for the plug) and were able to decipher the URL through my messy rambling. You may quickly find I am a sucker for a dumb stat, particularly if I can do a little dumb amateur analysis with it. (Fake math is fun.)

In that spirit:

Referee Joe Ernst arrived on the Sound Tigers' scene tonight -- he's evidently been around the block, just not Main Street -- and promptly called six interference minors leading to power plays out of 16 total in the game. There was actually a seventh negated by another penalty after the play. Some were quite interesting. Some looked quite a bit like something else.* But all made this game proportionally weird.

None of the first 31 power plays called in a Bridgeport game this year were for interference. Last year, only 11.6 percent of all power plays in Bridgeport games came from interference minors (10.9 percent for, 12.1 percent against). So in this game, 37.5 percent of all power plays -- 38.9 percent of all penalties -- came from interference minors.***

What does that mean? Nothing. How many ways could a good mathematician caution me? Lots.

That's just the kind of place this is. Sorry.

The lead tomorrow will say something like how Bridgeport played the big boys tonight after two games against teams that had something working against them. That's not to discount those wins, but to credit this Wilkes-Barre/Scranton team, which really looks pretty good. You give Robbie Schremp and Erik Christensen and Jonathan Filewich and Ryan Stone and Micki DuPont and guys like that a five-on-three, and they're gonna make you pay -- as Phil pointed out, a lot like Bridgeport can do.

Both teams capitalized on one power play. The Pens capitalized after one of theirs, capitalized at four-on-four (after a weird play involving Drew Fata, who took a slash across the right hand), put the game away and didn't let Bridgeport get going. Compound that with guys getting left alone in scoring areas...

There's plenty of growing time left for Bridgeport, but at least now they've seen what they're up against.

LINEUPS

BRIDGEPORT
F: Comeau-Colliton (A)-Regier
Nokelainen-Ogorodnikov-Nilsson
Tambellini-Nielsen-Ferraro
Aquino-Marjamaki-(Pitton-scratch)
D: Fata-Berry
Mitchell-Wotton (C)
Rourke (A)-Goulet

WILKES-BARRE/SCRANTON
F: Sestito-Christensen-Filewich
Stone-Schremp-James
Dixon-Talbot (A)-Kennedy
(Lannon-scratch)-Brodziak-Wallace
D: Nasreddine (C)-Skolney**
Welch-DuPont (A)
Carkner-Gilbert

Bridgeport lines again shuffled quite a bit.

In each half of the ice, the Penguins have two ads in the neutral zone, three across the inside of the blue line and two more in the goalie no-fly-zones in the corners. Impressive. (Guess advertisers want to reach 8,000 people. Or 7,787, even.)

*-Of course, he's a little closer than I am.
**-That's 32-28. Familiar but backwards.
***-Restored the original fake math, which wasn't faulty after all. Double minor for counting error at 4:00.

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