If your head was spinning a little bit when you left Xfinity Mobile Arena on Tuesday night, or after you finished watching on TV at home, you’re not alone. One of the most bizarre overtimes in recent memory preceded the successful shootout that gave the Flyers an extra point and a 3-2 victory. Here’s a look at what happened.
Zegras Penalty & Malkin Disallowed Goal
In the first minute of overtime, Trevor Zegras was called for a slash behind the Flyers net. During the delayed penalty, Evgeni Malkin came on as the extra attacker, took a pass in the slot and scored, seemingly giving Pittsburgh the win.
There was one problem with this maneuver from a Pittsburgh perspective – goaltender Arturs Silovs wasn’t on the bench yet. He wasn’t really even close to the bench yet. In fact, Malkin jumped on the ice while Silovs was still in his own slot. Malkin scored the goal before Silovs had even reached the red line.
The Flyers who were on the ice knew something was up, and immediately appealed to the officials for a too-many-men penalty. They were mostly right, but not completely. What happened in this situation is covered under Rule 71.1, Premature Substitution, which states in part:
When a goalkeeper leaves his goal area and proceeds to his players’ bench for the purpose of substituting another player, the skater cannot enter the playing surface before the goalkeeper is within five feet (5’) of the bench … There shall be no time penalty to the team making the premature substitution, but the resulting face-off will take place at the center ice face-off spot when play is stopped beyond the center red line.
So in this instance, Malkin’s goal came off the board, but the Penguins did not incur a too-many-men penalty. This is why the game continued with a Pittsburgh 4-on-3 overtime power play.
Zegras Penalty Ends, Malkin Called For Hooking
When a power play occurs in overtime, it’s a 4-on-3 situation that becomes 4-on-4 when the penalized player is released from the box. It remains 4-on-4 until the next whistle, at which time the play reverts to 3-on-3.
When Zegras’s time was up, he came back on the ice and it was a 4-on-4 situation. But before any whistle occurred, Malkin was called for hooking Noah Cates. As is customary, Sam Ersson headed to the bench for an extra attacker. That extra attacker came on, creating a rarely-seen 5-on-4 overtime situation that lasted until Pittsburgh touched up at the 1:46 mark.
Foerster Scores, But Flyers Ruled Offside
The next sequence was relatively straightforward, which is saying a lot. Tyson Foerster scored what appeared to be the game winner with 28 seconds remaining. However, the Flyers were deemed to have entered the zone offside. Zegras simply made a stickhandling move in an unfortunate spot, and the puck missed entering the zone by fractions of an inch, sending others in offside.
Overtime Ends With A Melee
There were some frank exchanges of ideas at the end of the overtime period, and the result was four players from each team receiving a ten-minute misconduct. This became rather significant because of the rules governing the shootout in 84.4 of the NHL rulebook, specifically this part about shootout eligibility:
All players are eligible to participate in the shootout unless they are serving a ten minute misconduct or have been assessed a game misconduct or match penalty.
So whereas minors or even majors for the game-ending discussions would have meant everyone was still eligible for the shootout, the doling out of 10-minute misconducts changed everything.
For the Flyers, it was Foerster, Zegras, Jamie Drysdale, and Owen Tippett – all guys the Flyers could put out for a shootout at just about any point, and could have been devastating if the shootout had gone long.
For the Penguins, three guys were rather inconsequential – Noel Accari, Parker Wotherspoon, and Ryan Shea have combined for exactly zero shootout attempts in their NHL careers. The fourth guy was Sidney Crosby, who is sixth all-time in NHL history in career shootout goals and has a 38.8 percent career shootout shooting percentage. The Flyers would likely have traded the four guys they lost just for Pittsburgh losing Crosby if such an offer had been on the table.
There were no outrageous events in the shootout itself, and the Flyers took the extra point thanks to goals from Matvei Michkov and Bobby Brink along with two saves from Ersson. So in some ways like the five-overtime game in 2000, it’s another classic game against Pittsburgh that will be remembered fondly in Philadelphia for quite some time, since the Flyers won. It’s a series of events that we’re not likely to see again anytime soon.
