A great thing about watching hockey for decades is you get to see records and milestones you thought unbreakable get absolutely destroyed.
And I’m not just talking about Alex Ovechkin last weekend overtaking Wayne Gretzky’s all-time goals mark of 894, which came 31 years after The Great One overtook Gordie Howe and his 801 that nobody thought could be eclipsed. No, I’m thinking more about the Kraken and two “I can’t believe what my eyes just saw” moments that came out in their favor earlier this season.
One of those historic moments has already been obliterated before the season even ended. The other? It might never be matched, let alone broken. Yeah, I know. I just jinxed the whole thing. Either way, as fans of a relatively new NHL franchise, we’ve been very fortunate to have witnessed both events so quickly.
The first occurred back in December when the Kraken scored three goals in the final 4:45 of regulation before eventually beating the Vancouver Canucks 5-4 in overtime.
In doing so, they became just the third team in the NHL’s century-plus existence to win a regular season game after trailing by three goals in the final five minutes. Sure, there were caveats, such as a lack of regular season overtimes for decades meaning prior NHL teams would have needed to score four times in the final five minutes to “win” such games – upping the difficulty exponentially.
It's no coincidence the other three-goal comebacks happened during the regular season overtime era, one by Montreal with 3:21 to go in 2014 and another by San Jose on Oct. 28 of this very season with 4:28 left.
For playoff games, the Anaheim Ducks trailed Edmonton 3-0 with 3:16 to go in 2017 before tying it up and winning 4-3 in double overtime.
But still, the Kraken being just the third regular season team to pull it off in 107 years was truly special. Or at least it seemed that way until those lead-blowing Canucks got in on the act this past week, threw their five bucks atop the poker pile and said to all comers: “We’ll see your five and raise you five million, thank you very much.”
Indeed, the Canucks trailed Dallas 5-2 with just 59-plus seconds to go. Somehow, they scored three times before the final buzzer – taking just 55 seconds to do it – and won 6-5 in overtime. In Dallas, at that. Imagine being a Stars fan who left the game after an empty netter made it 5-2, then turning on your car radio once reaching the parking lot across from American Airlines Center only to realize your guys lost.
Kraken Hockey Network analyst Eddie Olczyk was doing the Kraken-Utah game that night when news of the comeback filtered into the studio and wondered aloud on-air how a team could even physically pull that off with faceoffs at center ice needing to take place. I wouldn’t have believed it either had I not pulled up video highlights on and witnessed what a total defensive collapse looks like in real-time.
And yeah, we may never see that happen again in our lifetimes. Until next week, perhaps.
There is a second Kraken moment from this season that I do truly believe may never be topped: Brandon Montour scoring an overtime winner last month just four seconds after the opening extra time faceoff.
I mean, even if you took the opposing team off the ice entirely a player would be hard-pressed to skate half the length of the rink and fire a puck past an actual goalie in less time.
It helped that the visiting Montreal Canadiens lined up three astride at the red line to take the faceoff. All Chandler Stephenson had to do was push the puck forward off the draw, after which a sprinting Montour breezed by everybody, caught up to the rubber and fired it home.
And yeah, it looked to me as if Montour got an impeccable, near-perfect jump towards the opposing net timed just as the puck was actually dropped on the faceoff.
Then again, I thought the same thing when I was in high school and watched on television as Brian Skrudland scored nine seconds into overtime to give Montreal a win over Calgary in Game 2 of the 1986 Stanley Cup Final. To me, Skrudland’s feat seemed impossible to beat until Mats Sundin managed a regular-season overtime winner in just six seconds for Toronto back in 1995, followed by David Legwand of Nashville and Ovechkin of Washington each equaling that mark weeks apart in 2006.
Those goals came in the 5-on-5 overtime setup that Skrudland faced when he scored what’s still the NHL playoff record fastest OT goal. Two other teams equaled the 6-second feat in 2018 after the start of 3-on-3 overtimes.
All of this got me thinking: Is there any one NHL record with zero chance of being broken?
We could go with Montreal’s 10 consecutive overtime wins in the 1993 playoffs, but I’m sticking with my all-time favorite for this one: Bill Mosienko of the Chicago Black Hawks scoring three goals all by himself in 21 seconds of a March 1952 game against the New York Rangers.
Yes, the fastest hat-trick in NHL history has stood for 73 years and is likely to last 73 more. Think about it: What are the odds of the same player even staying on the ice nowadays after scoring once? They do the handshake line at the bench and often take a seat. If they are lucky enough to stay on and score again right away, there’s no way they’re still out there for a third try. Not with the average shift nowadays lasting just 45 seconds compared to two or three minutes in decades prior.
And to Olczyk’s on-air point about this week’s Vancouver comeback against Dallas, how does a player such as Mosienko even physically get down the ice fast enough from an ensuing faceoff to score so quickly? Yeah, he was a speed demon, but still. I mean, the Canucks needed more than twice as much time to score three goals against Dallas as a team.
Alas, we’ll never really know quite how Mosienko did it other than second-and-third-hand accounts from people mostly long since dead.
While you may find rare online video snippets of a couple of the goals, there exists no real-time game broadcast footage of the entire 21-second stretch from start to finish. Thus, Mosienko’s feat has been left largely to our imagination.
It helped that it was the third period of the season’s final game, and Mosienko was chasing an impressive 30 goals in what was then just a 50-game campaign. He got No. 29, stayed out to try for No. 30 and got it seconds later. He then got sprung again off the ensuing faceoff to cap the hat-trick as the Black Hawks rallied from 6-2 down in the third to eventually win 7-6. That comeback sound familiar?
About as familiar as the Kraken rallying in the third to beat the Canucks. Or the Canucks laying waste to that feat just months later.
But just as history will likely always have Mosienko, we Kraken faithful can almost certainly count on Montour’s mark still being around generations from now.
Or at least through next week.
