The Calgary Flames had just failed to beat Brandon Bussi when the strangest few seconds of the NHL weekend unfolded at the Scotiabank Saddledome on Sunday. Mikael Backlund had rushed in on the Carolina Hurricanes goaltender while his teammates changed behind him, and missed. Carolina collected the rebound and went to move the puck out of their end, and then everybody fell over.
Not everybody. But four of them, at once, none anywhere near the puck.
It started with one Carolina player losing his feet. On the way down he took a teammate with him, and the pair of them, entirely by accident, each managed to clip a Flames forward on their way to the ice. Four men down in a heap in the space of about a second, while the puck carried on without any of them.
The internet had a lovely time with it.
“Ten forty-five pm beer league energy,” one wrote, with another suggesting the guilty parties were “three drinks in.”
“Missing a couple Looney Tunes sound effects,” said a third, while somebody else settled on two words: “The beautiful game.”
How did the Flames beat the Hurricanes?
Carolina arrived in Calgary at 7-1-1 and chasing an eighth straight win, against a Flames side sitting 1-6-0 and bottom of the entire league. Devin Cooley then stopped 34 of 36 shots, Matvei Gridin scored with 90 seconds left in the second, Morgan Frost converted a Zayne Parekh feed, and Yegor Sharangovich buried the winner with four and a half minutes remaining.
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It was Calgary’s first home win of the season and it came against the defending Stanley Cup champions.
The one sour note was Backlund. The captain left late in the third after a heavy hit into the boards from William Carrier and didn’t return. He told Expressen afterwards that nothing was broken and that he was hoping to play Thursday against Minnesota.
“The hit hurt a bit, so we’ll see whether I’m in when we next play,” Backlund said.
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