Hurtin' for Certain: an 0-3 weekend. Ouch.

Oh, ouch. My poor team. Their road game in Bridgeport this afternoon was a 5-1 loss.

Here is the recap from the Phantoms site.

Here is the box score from the AHL stats site.

I didn't get to see the game online or listen to it, but I did have a look at the box score, and I can see right off the bat that there were some changes to the list of scratched players.

Tonight's scratches, judging from the names that are absent from the box score, were Teslak, Ramholt, Laliberte, Klotz, Beaulieu, and Hersley. I know Beaulieu is injured, and someone posted yesterday on the flyersphans.com Phantoms Phorum that Hersley is hurt as well.

I did also notice one significant change to our lineup. According to the box score, we have two different assistant captains tonight than we've had since opening night. The box score lists the assistant captains as Guenin and Curry. Between opening night and last night, they were Syvret and Powe.

Our starting lineup was Aubin; Syvret, DeSantis; Matsumoto, Kane, Giroux.

It's nice to see that our guys scored shorthanded in the first three minutes of the first period. We haven't been scoring tons this season, but I noticed that in our first three home games, more than once we buried the first shot of the game or at least of the period. So we're coming out of the gate with some jump.

Unfortunately, after that, our scoring was done for the night. We gave up five unanswered goals, two of which were powerplay tallies. Bridgeport had seven PPs compared to our 4. There were two fights in the first period; the first one took place 45 seconds into the game, between Powe and Bridgeport's Jackman. Late in the first period, Jackman went at it again, this time with Szwez.

Even though we lost the game, I can glean from the stats that there's some improvement in the amount of time and activity that we've had in the opposing end. We outshot Bridgeport 31-22, and 16 of our shots on goal came in the first period alone. That compares favorably to our situation in prior games, when we couldn't get set up at the other end or get the puck on net. I also liked seeing that Bridgeport only got two shots on goal against us in the entire second period. We should only be able to maintain THAT statistic in every period. ;) That would be nice. Our goalies would be sitting there playing solitaire waiting for a puck to come their way, but it'd still be nice.

The rest of the Phantoms' games in October will take place on the road. Our next contest will be on Friday in Hartford at 7 PM.