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BRIDGEPORT, Conn. — Half their corps of forwards may have been in the NHL. The Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins still had their defense and goaltenders.
Brad Thiessen made 22 saves Friday in the Penguins’ 2-0 win over the Bridgeport Sound Tigers at Webster Bank Arena.
The Penguins scored just before the midpoint of the first and second periods and held the similarly decimated Sound Tigers mostly quiet at even strength.
“One thing we talked about with the team was we really liked the guys we had here,” Penguins coach John Hynes said. “We needed to play a certain way, at a high tempo.”
The Penguins disrupted Bridgeport in the Sound Tigers’ zone, blocked shots and held them to 22 shots. Thiessen stopped them all for his fifth shutout and the sixth for the Penguins as a team.
“There were a couple of scrambles, but the guys picked up sticks and took away rebounds,” Thiessen said.
After a season-long three-game losing streak, the Penguins have won three in a row, as Thiessen has allowed just one goal on 62 shots.
“We’ve had pretty good attention to our defense coming off the three-game losing streak,” Thiessen said.
They did so with some new faces in the lineup.
After sending four top forwards to Pittsburgh on Thursday, the big club called again Friday for Eric Tangradi. That left Wilkes-Barre/Scranton without its five leading scorers and six of its top seven.
But Tim Wallace, who was No. 6 with 28 points going into Friday, would be No. 2 for Bridgeport and would have led the Sound Tigers’ active players.
Wallace set up Chris Collins for a shot that Joel Martin stopped. Ben Street drove to the net to score on the rebound, his fourth goal, to make it 2-0 in the second period.
The Penguins scored first at 9:23 of the first period. Starting to put lots of pressure on the Bridgeport defense, Kevin Veilleux worked around the right post and had the puck knocked away into the slot.
Carl Sneep was there to fire a shot off the post and in before Martin recovered.
Bridgeport, beset just as much by call-ups and injuries, played a man short after the New York Islanders recalled Michael Haley in the morning.
The Sound Tigers are 1-12-2-1 since the beginning of January and have lost seven in a row.
“One big thing the last three games has been the penalty kill,” Thiessen said. “It’s something we know we’ve got to get better at, blocking shots and pressuring all over the place.”
What got through, Thiessen handled.
“He’s really on top of his game,” Hynes said. “He really looks fresh. He looks fast. He’s controlling his rebounds really well. He’s making saves when he needs to, and that’s the most important thing for a goalie.”