College Sports
Mulligan like an MVP for P-Bruins
Staff Writer | Standard-Times As Hartford Wolf Pack coach John Paddock scouts key members of the Providence Bruins during their Calder Cup semifinal playoff series, he’d be smart to write down the name Tom Mulligan. A 25-year-old New Bedford native who played defense on his high school hockey team, Mulligan set a record this year […]

As Hartford Wolf Pack coach John Paddock scouts key members of the Providence Bruins during their Calder Cup semifinal playoff series, he’d be smart to write down the name Tom Mulligan.
A 25-year-old New Bedford native who played defense on his high school hockey team, Mulligan set a record this year for assists, but not with his hockey stick. He carries bandages, tape and surgical scissors on his belt.
Mulligan, you see, is the P-Bruins athletic trainer.
“We were thinking about giving him the team MVP,” assistant coach Bill Armstrong said after a recent practice.
“We couldn’t do it, but if anybody deserved an MVP it would be him,” agreed head coach Peter Laviolette. “Tommy’s done a great job, phenomenal.”
When a player misses a game with an injury, the statistician marks it down as one man-game lost for the team.
During last year’s dream season that ended with an AHL championship, Providence lost 76 man-games. This season the P-Bruins exceeded that total by the end of November.
An AHL record 70 players have skated for the P-Bruins this season, and the total of man-games lost climbed throughout the winter like the price on the gas pump.
The P-Bruins current total of man-games lost due to injury alone is around 400. Combine that with suspensions and all the recalls by the similarly-battered Boston Bruins and the total for man-games lost exceeds 830.
“You learn by doing,”‘ Mulligan said.
“If you learn by doing,” Laviolette said, “he should be a genius in the field of medicine by now.”
Mulligan didn’t feel too smart on the final weekend of the regular season when newcomer Mike Sylvia was knocked unconscious during a game at Springfield, Mass. Along with the standard how-many-fingers question, Mulligan asked Sylvia “What’s my name?”
“Then it dawned on me – wait a second,” Mulligan told himself. “He probably doesn’t know my name. I just met him yesterday.”
During the season Mulligan spends seven days a week in the bowels of the Providence Civic Center. On game days he arrives at 8 a.m. and doesn’t go home until 11 p.m. Even on non-practice days, players stroll in for injury rehabilitation and to get their aching muscles massaged.
With hockey players’ ever-growing fear of concussions, the trainer has to be a good listener. Gone are the days when a player gets knocked cold and argues his way back onto the ice in 10 minutes.
“Some guys make a big deal out of the littler things, and some guys don’t pay attention to some things that they should,” Mulligan said. “That’s half the battle, the psychological issue.”
“Tommy’s good with people, that’s one of his strengths outside of being knowledgeable in what he does,” Laviolette said. “He’s a good person and he’s a good communicator. People like Tommy, they respect him. He’s a young kid taking care of guys who are 31, 32 years old.”
“We have a great atmosphere here in the locker room and Tommy’s a big part of it.”
Mulligan’s work load intensified even more this season when the man-games lost spread off the ice.
“We even lost our equipment manager (Vinny Ferraiuolo),” he said. Ferraiuolo had to assist in Boston after its equipment manager, Peter Henderson, was sidelined with an illness.
That left Mulligan with a college intern and half the work of the equipment manager, including sewing holes in hockey socks and new name tags onto jerseys for players being recalled from Greenville, S.C. (ECHL) or signed to tryout contracts.
“They stay here as late or later than we do,” Laviolette said of Mulligan and Ferraiuolo.
After graduating Quinnipiac College in 1997 with a degree in physical therapy, Mulligan interned with the Boston Bruins under fellow Quinnipiac alumnus Tim Trahant and there he fulfilled a life-long dream of meeting Ray Bourque.
“I grew up living and dying by the Bruins,” he said. “When I started in Boston, I had never really met a professional athlete.”
Mulligan was at the Bruins practice facility in Wilmington when Rob DiMaio and other players came into the trainer’s room and introduced themselves.
“He was talking to me like a regular person. It didn’t really faze me, then all of a sudden Ray walks in and I just stood there and froze,” Mulligan said. “He walked out. About five minutes later he comes back in. He walks over to me, taps me on the shoulder, goes ‘Hey, you the new kid?’ I went ‘hum-a-da-hum-a-da…’
“Since I was 5-years-old, he was my idol. For me now, if I see him and say ‘Hey Ray, how ya doing?’ He’d say ‘Tom, how are ya?’ That’s amazing to me.”
Mulligan is glad he joined the P-Bruins when there was ample opportunity to learn the many administrative duties the trainer must perform, including detailed documentation of all treatment for legal purposes.
He realized very early how different this season was going to be.
“In training camp,” he said. “Keith McCambridge had one of his hamstring tendons skated over.” And rookie winger Jeff Zehr came to camp with a recurring knee injury that still threatens his career.
Providence’s season was barely a month old when tough-guy winger Aaron Downey was accidentally stabbed in the groin by teammate Johnathan Aitken’s stick.
Unless they repeat as Calder Cup champions, the gore on the ice that night will be the signature moment of the P-Bruins’ season.
“We were going to sandwich (the defenseman), we were going to knock him off the puck,” said Downey, who crashed together with Aitken and sustained a horrific injury. He thought he had a painful charley horse until blood began squirting out of his leg onto the ice.
“I was going towards Aitken and he wasn’t moving,” Mulligan recalled. “As I maybe got to the faceoff circle I saw this streak of blood… I tried to go underneath (Downey’s hockey pants), I wasn’t sure where it was coming from. I went to his main artery in the groin area and our doctor (Jack Bevivino) came out there. He used his belt as a tourniquet.”
“‘m fortunate that the great doctor in the stands, Jack Bevivino, did what he did,” Downey said. “I’m just fortunate there’s great help here, that’s for sure.”
“Seventy-plus players in and out of the line-up, plus Tommy’s had his hands full all year. We broke the transactions record this year.”
An athletic trainer in the AHL earns anywhere between $25,000 and $40,000 and from $40,000 and $110,000 in the NHL, depending on experience and on which end of the organization is signing the paychecks. Mulligan is signed with Providence.
He hopes in the future for a healthier squad and the lighter schedule that comes with it.
In the meantime, his fianc?e Kellie Charbonneau has been patient. She wasn’t a hockey fan when they met.
“She is now,” Mulligan said. “She’s unbelievably supportive, she knows I love this.”