Ref gives 'every player on the ice' misconduct in Panthers-Sens game
The officials didn't discriminate after a line brawl erupted in the third period of the Florida Panthers' 5-0 win over the Ottawa Senators on Monday night.
Tempers flared earlier in the game, but things reached a boiling point when Senators captain Brady Tkachuk bumped into Panthers goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky following a scoring chance in the latter half of the final stanza.
Florida defenseman Dmitry Kulikov then went after Tkachuk, and a full-out melee ensued.
Here's another look at referee Garrett Rank's all-encompassing penalty call:
"Every player on the ice has a 10-minute misconduct, among other penalties."
β Bally Sports Florida & Bally Sports Sun (@BallySportsFL) November 28, 2023
ππππ pic.twitter.com/PVECOF94eM
Panthers head coach Paul Maurice had to do a head count to determine how many players he had left on the bench.
You don't see a bench like that very often... pic.twitter.com/hgYzQhT90f
β Bally Sports Florida & Bally Sports Sun (@BallySportsFL) November 28, 2023
Brady and Matthew Tkachuk's grandmother, Geraldine, didn't seem too thrilled with how things unfolded with two of her grandsons involved.
Grandma Tkachuk reacts to all the chaos π pic.twitter.com/xfBaDEfE2Q
β Sportsnet (@Sportsnet) November 28, 2023
When the dust settled, the officials handed the Senators 54 minutes of penalties over the brouhaha (including a minor to Brady for the original contact with Bobrovsky), while the Panthers received 52. Ottawa racked up 84 penalty minutes in the game compared to Florida's 83.
Maurice had a quip ready when asked about all of those minutes postgame.
"That's mild," he said, according to The Associated Press' Tim Reynolds. "We only got to 160-some minutes. It's got to get into the 250s before it gets too squirrelly."
Maurice chose to look at all the fisticuffs as a positive.
"Sometimes hockey can get like that," he said, per Jameson Olive of the team's official website. "That's why the game's so darn great. It's graceful, beautiful, physical, and angry all at the same time. It's good."
Senators bench boss D.J. Smith lamented Ottawa's inability to focus on getting back into the game in the final frame.
"(In) the third period, you still have so much clock left," he said. "As a group, you can't self-implode like that and start taking penalties and (doing) those things. You're not going to win ... You've got to be smarter than that."
Brady Tkachuk didn't feel that the emotion the Senators displayed was a problem.
"I don't think it's bad to play with emotion," he said. "When this group plays with emotion we're a tough team to beat, and I think we rely on our emotion. It shows that we care ... about what we're doing here and about the guy next to (each of) us."
Earlier in the game, Senators forward Zack MacEwen got a five-minute match penalty for hitting Matthew Tkachuk in the head in retaliation for the Panthers forward's check on Ottawa blue-liner Travis Hamonic. Matthew was then caught on a hot mic saying, "F-----g Timmy (Stutzle) and (Jake) Sanderson are dead," before fighting the latter minutes later.
MacEwen was fined just over $2,000 for unsportsmanlike conduct by the NHL's Department of Player Safety on Tuesday.
The Senators and Panthers won't meet again until Feb. 20 in Sunrise, Florida. They'll also meet in Ottawa on April 4 before battling in Florida again on April 9.