Why Brad Marchand's Panthers teammates are shooting rats at him, injury updates, more East final notes

New York Times

23-05-2025

RALEIGH, N.C. — Brad Marchand is known as the 'The Rat,' so it was only fitting that when the longtime Boston Bruins forward was traded this season, his new team was the Florida Panthers, for whom a rat has effectively been a second logo ever since Scott Mellanby killed one in the home locker room then scored a 'Rat Trick' 30 years ago in the 1995-96 season opener against the Calgary Flames.
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That year, fans began throwing plastic rats onto the Miami Arena ice after Panthers goals. It became iconic as thousands flew onto the ice through a Cinderella run to the Stanley Cup Final in only the team's third year of existence. Scalpers even cleared toy stores and drug stores of the plastic critters and sold them on the streets of Overtown before games.
The hurling of rats onto the ice created such long delays, the NHL eventually prohibited the practice. So these days, Panthers diehards patiently wait until the end of the game to throw them to celebrate victories.
Now, with Marchand on board, a new ratty tradition has begun. Teammates fire the rats at their resident 'Rat' as they depart the ice after wins.
On Thursday night, after Florida's Game 2 win in the Eastern Conference final at Lenovo Center, a few Panthers fans in the rival barn threw rats on the ice, and captain Aleksander Barkov and Evan Rodrigues shot them at Marchand.
The @FlaPanthers celebrated their Game 2 victory by firing rats at Brad Marchand 🐀😂 pic.twitter.com/3Awgk7ZabO
— Sportsnet (@Sportsnet) May 23, 2025
For home games, the Panthers' coaches normally leave the ice through the tunnel behind their bench before the players depart the ice. At Lenovo, the coaches must walk the ice to the corner exit. So for the first time, Florida coach Paul Maurice got to see the tradition in action.
'I heard about it. I'd never seen it,' Maurice said. 'I will tell you, they're shooting them as hard as they can. They're not flipping them at him. There's shrapnel around there, and I didn't have any equipment on. I was just trying to get off the ice. Like, it hurt. But they're eating them up at them, and he's trying to get out of the way. It is funny as hell.'
Maurice said that the time immediately after the game belongs to the players. Every team has a clever player-of-the-game presentation. It usually starts with some inside joke in training camp. A few years ago, Maurice said Scott Tinkler — who worked for the Panthers as an assistant equipment trainer and is front and center in the 1996 Prince of Wales Trophy photo from after the Panthers upset the Penguins — ate an 80-ounce steak at a team outing. That bone is what players handed out in the room after wins during the season.
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'Those are all the really fun stories that are organic,' Maurice said. 'So now they're ripping plastic rats off Marchy, and it's funny as hell.'
'I don't know how it started,' Rodrigues added. 'But I think the first game he was here, we won, we ended up doing it and it's just kind of a become a little bit of a thing.'
Panthers first-line right wing Sam Reinhart was injured late in the first period of Florida's 5-0 win to take a 2-0 series' lead Thursday, and after he left, several players got looks next to Barkov and Rodrigues on the line.
'That guy, you can't really replace,' Barkov said. 'He does everything. But every single guy who played there was great.'
Sam Reinhart is OUT for the rest of Game 2 after this hit from Sebastian Aho in the first pic.twitter.com/Xwjqj6Kxj7
— B/R Open Ice (@BR_OpenIce) May 23, 2025
Added Carter Verhaeghe, 'We have such a deep team, and everyone can play with anyone. We have so much skill up and down the lineup. Guys that weren't in the lineup have been playing really well for us over the playoffs. It's a next-man-up mentality. Sam's obviously a huge part of our team, and hopefully he's doing OK, but the guys did a helluva job.'
The Panthers spent the night in Raleigh and flew back to Fort Lauderdale on Friday morning. Maurice said that Reinhart will be examined by doctors and that he'll have an update on his status Saturday morning.
Hurricanes defenseman Sean Walker and winger Seth Jarvis both left Game 2 with injuries, as well.
Coach Rod Brind'Amour indicated to reporters on Friday that Jarvis will be 'fine' but Walker is 'a little iffy, but better than I thought he'd be,' per Hurricanes.com's Walt Ruff.
Jarvis was injured late in the second period on a hit by Niko Mikkola and return briefly in the third but didn't play the final eight minutes. Walker missed the entire third after a hit by A.J. Greer early in the second.
AJ Greer NAILED Sean Walker and he was slow to get up 😳💥 pic.twitter.com/5hFv0bskKu
— Gino Hard (@GinoHard_) May 23, 2025
For two series, Andrei Svechnikov was the Hurricanes' most dangerous forward, scoring eight goals in their first 10 playoff games. It felt like a major development for a team that's perpetually been in search of a true game-breaking forward.
Svechnikov, for years, has been their closest approximation.
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'The effort's always been there,' Brind'Amour said before the series. 'What you're seeing out of him here, through these two rounds anyway, has been — he's impactful even when he's not on the scoresheet. You just kind of notice him. Whether he's on the scoresheet or not, he's just been impactful in the games.'
On Thursday night, he was on the scoresheet — just not in the right spot.
Two days after watching Sebastian Aho's retaliatory punch against Anton Lundell burn the Hurricanes, Svechnikov was the one taking the bait, taking a penalty for punching Matthew Tkachuk at 9:10 of the second period. Shortly after, Sam Bennett scored to put Florida up 3-0.
Andrei Svechnikov interferes with Matthew Tkachuk and then gives him a shot to the back of the head 😳 pic.twitter.com/ooDbXLdReo
— Gino Hard (@GinoHard_) May 23, 2025
Earlier in the period, a bad set of decisions by Svechnikov in the defensive zone helped lead to the Panthers' first goal, and a failed clear led to their second. He finished minus-3.
'My mistake totally,' Svechnikov said. 'Can't do anything right now, so (we've) gotta move on and think positively. (The first period was) tough. No question about it. But it happens sometimes. You've just got to stay in control and stay positive. In the first period, I didn't do it.'
Svechnikov was asked how to avoid trying to do too much, given the Hurricanes' increasingly dire reality.
'It starts with me,' he said. 'Play simpler and I'm sure it will be fine.'
Many expected this to be a tight, low-scoring series, but the scores in Games 1 and 2 were 5-2 and 5-0. Maurice insisted that wasn't indicative.
'This is so much tighter than the score tells it is,' he said. 'This is not a flow series. It never will be between these two teams. It's a grind from one end, but it's a fast grind. It's not casual in that, you know, dump a puck and sit back. It's the exact opposite of what both teams do. They put it deep and they get after it.
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'There is — this is a Ralph Krueger word — 'hecticity' in the games. Hectic. Clearly, that's not a word, but Ralph uses it, and it describes this series and how we play against each other exactly. Change of possessions, I don't even know if we can measure that, but there's an awful lot of change in possessions when we play them because the sticks are so good and they're on the puck and there's no gap. There's not the comfort level that the final score tells you.
'I will not feel comfortable going into Game 3, but that's how I live.'
A pivotal moment early in the second period in Game 2 came when Gustav Forsling threw a puck out of the zone and it suddenly came back to Aho all alone in front of the net and he scored to make it 3-1.
But something didn't feel right to the Panthers' video coaches. It just felt like the play had to be offside.
But from the initial looks the Panthers got from the program feed, it wasn't clear if Tkachuk sent the puck back in or if Carolina's Brent Burns did.
Maurice called a timeout, ultimately challenged the play and the goal was wiped off the board after a review.
Sebastian Aho's goal comes off the board as the review rules that Burns touched the puck here, so offside#RaiseUp | #StanleyCup pic.twitter.com/p7LaYGwFOk
— Hockey Daily 365 l NHL Highlights & News (@HockeyDaily365) May 23, 2025
'It's 3-nothing. But 3-1 with 39 minutes left, you've got a problem,' Maurice said. 'The only thing we had is it didn't look right. And we waited, waited, waited, and found the clip at the end. Sometimes, we just don't get the video to prove what we feel. So the timeout, you get Myles Fee in there going, 'That's got to be an offside, but we can't prove it.' So that's the timeout. We get then the blue-line camera zoomed in and we get one more look at it, and then it was pretty clear.'
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Maurice doesn't know why the Panthers are 7-2 on the road and have already scored 43 goals — six off the 1993 Kings' NHL record.
'Last year, we were a pretty dominant road team. This year we were good until about the last month and a half, and then kind of some injuries and stuff,' he said. 'I don't think that we feel any differently on the road. The intimidation of the road game left our game 15 years ago. I mean, it used to be different going on the road, and it has nothing to do the fans. I think the buildings are louder.
'It's just the structure of teams, the structure of lines. It used to be if you got down 2-nothing at home, your fourth line didn't even ask if they were going out. They just jumped over the boards. And they didn't bring all their equipment with them. It was on. So it's different now.'
Still, it has to be a momentum builder to hear how much the Panthers have quieted down the road buildings in their past four wins, right?
Maurice said no.
'We've had some dogs at home, had some tough ones, but our crowds are really good to us,' he said. 'I don't think that you necessarily gain anything on the road. You just don't lose anything. … There's a huge advantage to the home team in the emotional. I don't think that the road team participates in that. Like it's quiet, we don't know.
'The music's still really loud and they're cheering and so we don't pick up on that. But there can be a real advantage for the home team when they get something good to happen.'
With Forsling scoring the winning goal Thursday, the Panthers now have 18 goal scorers in the playoffs. Only four players who have played games don't have a goal — Rodrigues (12 games), Tomas Nosek (seven), Nico Sturm (seven) and Mackie Samoskevich (four).
VIDEO!
Inside the @FlaPanthers radio booth for Gus Forsling's opening goal & eventual game-winner from Thursday night's Game 2 in Raleigh. @560WQAM @RealRadio921 pic.twitter.com/Bx27e7jZNu
— Doug Plagens (@DougPlagens) May 23, 2025
While players have said nobody pays attention to who scores the goals as long as somebody does, Maurice did have a funny line to end his press availability Friday, saying, 'The guys that are in and out of the lineup that haven't scored are going to get chirped pretty hard now. The watch on everybody who hasn't scored is on.'