Patrick Williams, TheAHL.com Features Writer
Already the Macgregor Kilpatrick Trophy winner as the AHL’s regular-season champion, the Providence Bruins have a chance to make history tonight.
The Bruins’ 54 wins are a league record for a 72-game season. But with a 55th victory tonight at home against Utica (7 ET, 
), the B’s would finish with the best regular-season record in the AHL’s 90-year history.
The standard – a .775 points percentage by the 57-13-10 Binghamton Rangers of 1992-93 – has stood for 33 years. Head coach Ryan Mougenel said that he has not discussed the record with his players. Still, he certainly recognizes its significance.
“It’s an amazing thing that players have done in this league,” said Mougenel, just off the ice following Friday’s morning skate in Utica. “But we’re just playing and kind of enjoying the moment.”
They’ll be facing a stubborn opponent fighting for its own playoff life. A 7-1-1-1 push since March 25, including a 4-1 victory over the Bruins in Friday’s opener of the home-and-home series, has held the Comets in the North Division race. Utica needs to defeat Providence while Rochester loses its final two games in regulation to pull off a miraculous finish and claim the fifth and final postseason berth in the North Division.
Mougenel did not dress captain Patrick Brown, all-AHL goaltender Michael DiPietro, forwards Riley Tufte and John Farinacci, or defensemen Michael Callahan, Victor Söderström and Christian Wolanin on Friday night. Lukas Reichel remains on recall to Boston.
If anyone has earned a breather, it’s DiPietro. Voted a First Team AHL All-Star for the second year in a row, DiPietro leads the AHL in wins, goals-against average and save percentage while ranking fifth in minutes played. He’s also a big reason Providence is second in the league in goals allowed and fourth in penalty killing.
“It’s no secret why we’ve really won games that we shouldn’t have,” Mougenel said. “It’s Michael.”
This is the fourth time that Providence has won the Macgregor Kilpatrick Trophy (1998-99, 2007-08, 2012-2013). It is also the team’s fourth division title in the past seven seasons. They have only lost back-to-back games twice all season, a remarkable achievement in a league where the injuries, player recalls, and games come at a team quickly – especially a top-flight team that every opponent targets on the schedule and is ready to play.
Of his leadership group, led by Fred T. Hunt Memorial Award recipient Brown, Mougenel said, “They right the ship whenever it’s going the wrong way.”
Regular-season success is nice, but the Bruins are hungry for a lot more. They have won only one playoff series in the last eight years, a first-round victory over Springfield in 2025. And while they have appeared in the conference finals five times (2000, 2001, 2005, 2009, 2017), Providence has not reached the Calder Cup Finals since their championship season of 1998-99.
That team, led by a rookie coach in Peter Laviolette, was one of the best squads in league history; after going 19-54-7 the season before, the 1998-99 P-Bruins won 56 games in a 70-point improvement and then went 15-4 in the playoffs to win the city’s first Calder Cup since 1956.
The 1992-93 Rangers are the cautionary tale. They posted 57 wins, a league-record 124 points, and were headlined by league MVP Don Biggs, AHL rookie and goalie of the year Corey Hirsch, and a pair of Russian rookie phenoms in Sergei Zubov and Alexei Kovalev. But the Rangers barely survived a scare from Baltimore before losing to Rochester in the second round of the playoffs.
Once the regular season ends this weekend, everything resets. Providence will have a first-round bye before jumping into play against either Bridgeport, Hershey or Springfield in the division semifinals.
But first they might topple one of the AHL’s most significant records.
