SUNRISE, Fla. – Matthew Tkachuk was trying to remember at what point in a 10-goal first period between the Florida Panthers and Montreal Canadiens did he start to feel like things were getting weird.
The fact that he couldn’t remember showed just how weird it was. Because there were simply too many goals to choose from.
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“I forget what goal it was with nine minutes left (in the first), maybe it was 6-3? Or 5-3? We were like, it’s a lot of goals so far,” Tkachuk said. “Yeah, when it was 3-3, it was pretty crazy. The 4-3 goal, actually, that’s what it was. The 4-3 goal, when (Aaron Ekblad) scored, it hit off the D’s foot.
“That’s like, put pucks on net, you never know what’s going to happen tonight.”
The Panthers and Canadiens combining for 10 goals in the first period marked only the third time in NHL history that had ever happened, and the first time since 1987. It was something Panthers coach Paul Maurice compared to an episode of “The Twilight Zone.”
“I’ve never seen anything like that in 25 years. Ever. That many goals,” Maurice said. “There were more goals than chances to score, and that’s a rarity. All I can say is it completely affected the rest of the game, I think for both teams. And I’m not sure there’s anything necessarily usable of the video to the game of hockey.”
Maurice wasn’t wrong about the chance-to-goal ratio – Natural Stat Trick pegged the Panthers for 1.34 expected goals in the first period and the Canadiens for 0.31, and the score was 7-3 Florida after one period. But the TV comparison showed Maurice’s age, because his defenceman Ekblad probably had a more relevant show to compare the experience to.
“Weird. Crazy. ‘Stranger Things,’” Ekblad said. “Yeah, that was a weird game.”
The Canadiens actually jumped out to a lead 16 seconds into the first, when former Panther Mike Matheson beat Sergei Bobrovsky.
“We had a great first shift and then things kind of went a little sideways from there,” Canadiens captain Nick Suzuki said. “I think our three goals didn’t really show the way we were playing. We were playing really bad. Showed on their side, and we gave up way too many chances the whole game. Against a team like that, with the offensive players they have, they’re going to score, and I felt like we were playing like shinny hockey in the summer and they were playing to make a playoff spot.
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“So it was pretty unacceptable from us.”
The Canadiens scored on their first three shots on Bobrovsky, and while they were credited with a shot on goal when Kaiden Guhle hit the side of the net just after the 12-minute mark of the first, they didn’t really test Bobrovsky again until Alex Belzile took a shot from the slot at 14:32 of the first.
The Panthers had a 7-3 lead by then.
“It’s not fun,” Bobrovsky said. “After three shots, you already can’t have, well you basically cannot come up with a good game. … I thought (the Canadiens goalies) were pretty much in the same shoes. You look at the goals, and there’s not much you can do there, there’s deflections, there’s re-directions. It was like a pickleball.”
It obviously wasn’t fun in the other net, either.
“It was 3-3 in how many minutes were played? It was just really weird,” Canadiens defenceman David Savard said. “They kept putting the puck in our net and it was no fun to be out there.”
Canadiens coach Martin St. Louis probably put it best.
“I wouldn’t say it was a bad effort,” he said. “I would just say we weren’t very intelligent defensively tonight.”
There was a lot of history in that first period. It was the sixth time that two teams combined to score seven goals in the first 10 minutes of a game – the Panthers and Canadiens needed just 9:09 to hit the mark. It was the fifth time nine different players scored a goal in the first period. But this apparently never struck the players as it was happening.
“Uh, no,” Tkachuk said.
But if there was a historic moment that counted the most, it was Maurice, one of the best quotes in the NHL for his entire career, being essentially left speechless by what he witnessed.
“There’s very few times I come out here and I don’t know what I’m going to say,” Maurice said. “I’ve never seen anything like that in my life. There wasn’t a guy behind our bench and I guarantee you there wasn’t a guy behind their bench who’d seen anything like that.
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“So we’ll just leave it with this: We really needed to win that game, we put up nine, we won the game and we got out of it healthy.”
There was just one negative for the Panthers. After putting up seven goals in just over 13 minutes, the fans at FLA Live Arena began chanting “We want 10! We want 10!”
The Panthers never got there. So even though they lost 9-5, maybe it wasn’t all negative for the Canadiens, after all.
(Photo: Joel Auerbach / Getty Images)