0 1041

On a date of all fours, a defenseman with a four-letter last name scored his first and last NHL goal in the last game to end in a tie, the last regular-season game of the 2003-04 season.

The end of the season came on April 4, 2004, and the Carolina Hurricanes traveled down to Sunrise, Florida to play the Florida Panthers. A crowd of 16,207 came out to the Office Depot Center to watch. At first, they were sorely disappointed as the Florida defense gave their goalie Robert Luongo an unpleasant 25th birthday by allowing four goals in the first period. After the game, Luongo conceded, “The last two games, I gave up 11 goals. It’s not the way I really wanted to finish my year off.” It was so rough he missed his chance at the Roger Crozier Saving Grace Award for best save percentage.

Then the Panthers “rolled off six straight goals in the next 26:23.” Captain Olli Jokinen explained, “Everything in the last game is what you’ve been seeing the whole year. We started flat. It’s 4-0 after the first, and then we play our best hockey of the year the next 25, 30 minutes. And then all of a sudden we stop playing again.” Jokinen had 3 assists, totaling 32 for the season, his personal best. His season total of 58 points made him the highest-scoring Finn in the NHL that year. He beat Montreal’s Saku Koivu by one point. “That was my goal going into the last game,” Jokinen said later. Panthers Coach John Torchetti commented, “We fought back hard, down 4-0. We haven’t seen that all year. We go up 6-4 and didn’t hold the lead. See, that just shows us how much more we have to emphasize this offseason getting some veteran leadership on this team.”

In the last five minutes of the game, two Carolina rookies found the net. At 15:04, Eric Staal scored his 11th goal of the season. Only two and a half minutes later, Brad Fast tied up the game. According to one Florida newspaper, “Carolina rallied to spoil Fan Appreciation Day.”

Fast had been drafted by Carolina back in 1999 before completing his NCAA career at Michigan State University. He then spent time in the AHL affiliation, the Lowell Lock Monsters. Carolina recalled Fast for their season finale, so he made his NHL debut scoring the tying goal. Fast took a pass from Rod Brind’Amour to score his only NHL goal in his only NHL game. Since no one scored in overtime, the game ended with a 6-6 tie. Later Fast told Ken Reid for One Night Only, “It will be a great trivia question. And some people – they won’t even understand why we were playing to a tie.” After remaining in the AHL until 2006, Fast went to play abroad until 2011.

With the tie, the Hurricanes ended the season on a four-game winless streak. However, they still beat the Panthers by one point by earning 76 (28-34-14-6) to their 75 (28-35-15-4). Florida took comfort in that still being five points better than their previous season total. Neither team made the playoffs when the Hurricanes finished third and the Panthers fourth in the Southeast Division. The Hurricanes had not made playoffs since losing the finals in 2002, but they came back to win the very next Stanley Cup championships in 2006. The Panthers have only made the playoffs five times in their 25 seasons.

The following season was cancelled due to a lockout. During the summer after that, in 2005, the NHL changed many rules. Among them was the new rule that if a game was tied after regulation without any scoring in overtime, a shootout would determine the winner. After all, the NHL found that during the 2003-04 season, fourteen percent of regular-season games ended in a tie (170 games of 1,230). With the new rule, games could no longer end in ties. As the NHL announced, “The new shootout rule guarantees a winner each game; ties have been eliminated. If a game remains tied after the five-minute, four-on-four overtime period, the teams will engage in a shootout, in which three skaters aside take alternating penalty shots against the opposing goaltender. If still tied after three shots per team, sudden-death shots will be taken to reach a decision.” That meant that the Hurricanes-Panthers game was the final NHL game to end in a tie and that Fast’s was the final tying goal to decide an NHL game.

 Additional Sources:

SIMILAR ARTICLES

0 3080

0 1882

NO COMMENTS

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.