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SUNRISE — The Florida Panthers seemed ready to put Saturday’s crazy preseason finale against the Tampa Bay Lightning behind them as soon it was over.
With the team getting their Stanley Cup championship rings later today and a banner raising ceremony coming on Tuesday, hard to blame them.
And since Saturday’s preseason game was an exhibition in which no stats count, it will not be talked about much more.
At least until the Lightning come to Sunrise on Nov. 15.
Surely it will be brought back then.
For now, however, it is over.
Well, after this:
Some of the stats and situations from Saturday night were simply absurd.
Or, as Evan Rodrigues said, “it was a little bit outrageous.’’
When the calculators finally stopped whirring early Sunday morning, the final game log ended with 65 penalties for 322 combined minutes.
Those kind of numbers are not seen every day, for sure, but have been put up before.
Although there are no records kept for preseason hockey, if Saturday night had been a regular-season game, the 322 PIM would have ranked ninth-most in NHL history just ahead of the 321 set by the Canadiens and Sabres in 1992.
The NHL record for most penalty minutes in a regular-season game is 419 between the Senators and Flyers in 2004.
When it came to total penalties, the 65 taken by the Panthers and Lightning would have ranked tied for seventh all time. The record is 86.
Of course, this was not a regular season game.
If it were, Tampa Bay coach Jon Cooper would not have brought six players from the AHL Syracuse Crunch to drop the hammer on the Panthers.
One stat that would have set an NHL record, again if this were a regular season game, was the amount of power play chances the Panthers got on Saturday.
Florida had 20 power play chances in the game, scoring six of its seven goals with some sort of man advantage.
The NHL record is 16 set by the Maple Leafs in 2005 in a game against the Atlanta Thrashers.
In the game, only 8:22 was played under 5-on-5 circumstances.
With 19 players getting either a match penalty or a game misconduct, there were not many left on the ice when the game was done.
In the final minutes of the third, the Lightning were down to eight skaters; the Panthers had nine.
Who were the last men standing on Saturday you ask?
Florida had Rodrigues, Tyler Motte, Cole Schwindt, Noah Gregor, Jeff Petry, Dmitry Kulikov, Jack Studnicka, Jesper Boqvist, Seth Jones, as well as goalies Daniil Tarasov and Sergei Bobrovsky.
The Lightning were left with Dominic James, Pontus Holmberg, Charle-Edouard D’Astous, Emil Lilleberg, Jack Finley, Wojciech Stachowiak, Boris Katchouk, and Declan Carlile aside from goalies Pheonix Copley and Andrei Vasilevskiy.
No wonder officials had a hard time keeping track of things.
Take the missing goal situation.
Boqvist scored in the third to give Florida an 8-0 lead with Niko Mikkola assisting.
Problem was, Mikkola should have been out of the game.
At 4:01 of the third, Mikkola was hit with 5 for fighting and a 10-minute misconduct.
Maybe no one told him?
Regardless, Mikkola kept on playing — he got in seven shifts before someone noticed he was out there when he should not have been.
At 14:55 of the third, play was stopped and the goal came off the board.
Mikkola left the game, and Rodrigues went to the box to serve the team penalty.
Yet here might be the wildest stat: In the final two exhibition games of the preseason, the Panthers and Lightning combined for 528 penalty minutes.
Guess who did not commit a single penalty?
Brad Marchand.
Of course, he did not play on Saturday night — but Marchand certainly stayed out of the fray on Thursday in Tampa.
Marchand knows the games don’t start for real until Tuesday.
Veteran move, right there.
Florida Panthers: The Ring Is Their Thing
Florida Panthers Place Forward on Waivers, Lose Goalie
Florida Panthers Roster Battle Comes Down to the Wire
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