Everyone gets ejected after an NHL fight
Hockey is one of the most physical sports and referees try to control this by imposing penalties if a push or trip goes too far. But Monday night in Ottawa, officials had had enough.
After a fight broke out in the third period of a rough game between the Florida Panthers and the Ottawa Senators, the officials threw up their hands and kicked every skater on the ice out of the game.
Florida was up 4-0 when Senators captain Brady Tkachuk came off the bench and made a quick escape. His shot was saved, he tried to score on the rebound, only to have the Panthers’ Dmitry Kulikov slam him into the boards with his stick. Both teams then rushed in and fights broke out everywhere.
The officials initially seemed to get the situation under control, but a blow heated things up again.
When the ice finally settled, Tkachuk was given a two-minute penalty for goalie interference and another two-minute penalty for trespassing. Kulikov was given two minutes for preparation. And then referee Garrett Rank made an unusual additional announcement: “Every player on the ice has a 10-minute misconduct.”
There were seven minutes left to play, so the ten-minute penalties were essentially ejections. The miscreants skated to the locker rooms, their games over.
Panthers coach Paul Maurice was seen grinning on the bench as he surveyed what was left of his team. With both sides undermanned for the rest of the match, one more goal was scored and the final score was 5-0 to the Panthers.
Even before the incident, it had been a tough match. Earlier in the period, the Senators’ Zack MacEwen had been ejected, and shortly afterward, Tkachuk and his brother Matthew, who plays for the Panthers, exchanged words. Then Matthew Tkachuk dropped the gloves to fight the Senators’ Jake Sanderson.
Geraldine Tkachuk, the players’ grandmother, was seen in the stands and seemed less than impressed.
As remarkable as the ejection of ten men may have been, it hardly seemed to surprise the participants.
“I mean, I don’t think it’s a bad thing to play with emotion,” Brady Tkachuk told the Associated Press. “I think when this group plays with emotion, we’re a tough team to beat, and I think we rely on our emotion and it shows that we care, shows that we care about what we’re doing here and the man who comes next. to us.”
Later in the third period, two more players were assessed misconduct penalties, bringing the total number of penalty minutes in the match to 167.
But this being hockey, that wasn’t anywhere near a record. In 2004, a series of brawls late in a game between the Senators and the Philadelphia Flyers led to 419 penalty minutes. Sixteen players were removed from that game, but never more than seven at a time.
“It’s just a hockey game,” Maurice said dismissively to reporters on Monday. “Both teams want to win, and then you get a little snarky. It was fun, it was good.”
When asked where the game ranked in his career in terms of physicality, Maurice said: “That’s mild. We only reached 160 minutes. It has to get into the 250s before it gets too squirrely.”