best (goalie-related) moment of the year!

I admit I really, really wish the NHL playoffs would be off for a day or two so I could catch up; every day I've been too distracted by wins or deflated by losses (Friday night EVERY team I was rooting for, ECHL, AHL, or NHL, lost, sometimes terribly. I was neutral about a few games, but every team I actively rooted for lost). I need a little more time to process the huge Blackhawks win vs Predators today (and think about the Marian Hossa hit), so here's the funniest thing I've seen in any hockey game I've seen the entire season...I'd never seen it happen before:


the puck headed towards Chicago's net. no goal, so play was stopped, but...the puck vanished, and Antti Niemi got patted down...then they were even feeling in the back of his pants (poor guy, in front of 22,000, and the NBC audience!). (I could make various saucy remarks about this...you know I like goalies...) no luck, and they wanted to continue play, but the officals in Toronto said they couldn't just get another puck, in case there'd be two pucks on the ice. then Captain Toews magically found it! that's a LOT of padding to not realize where a puck went. the NHL.com clip is pretty good and has the announcer's references to O'Hare security, and a famous scene in Slap Shot:



Puck Daddy had the video up before the game was even over...and because they didn't put up other stories for a long time, and this was featured prominently on the Yahoo Sports page (and Yahoo front page, maybe?) the comments section is a hideous mess of 1) arguing about the Hossa hit later in the game 2) trolls showing up to bash hockey. huh? CAN'T WE JUST ENJOY THIS?

the WGN radio announcers were even more amused; they really lost it after saying "Niemi's got to reposition his equipment," as did I...

1 comment:

Aubrey said...

That was pretty funny, although Pierre was maybe a little bit too excited about the possibilty of a strip search.

It was weird too. I can't recall any other time I saw a puck temporarily lost in a goalie's equipment that it wasn't found down behind one of his leg pads. How on earth did that thing get up under Niemi's jersey?