An entire hockey game happened tonight — an important one, too. The Flyers lost to the Arizona Coyotes, 2-1, on a day in which they had a chance to put even more space between themselves and the Detroit Red Wings in the NHL playoff picture.
Instead, it was a frustrating loss — a game where they largely outplayed the lowly Coyotes, but ran into an odd last-second goal against in the second period, a stellar performance from the opposing goaltender Mike Smith, and as a result lost what could have been two big points in the standings.
But the bigger loss tonight may have been one that came in the final minutes of the third period, when Arizona’s Martin Hanzal hit Claude Giroux from behind into the boards. His head hit the top of the boards, and the broadcast showed him clearly knocked out on the ice afterward. He has a history of concussions and … well, this could be very bad. We don’t really know his status as of now but it looked like it could be pretty darn serious. Let’s hope for the best.
This game got way more out of hand than it should have, and arguably, the officials losing control of this one could be the reason Giroux is out with a serious injury.
Hanzal was given a major penalty for the hit on Giroux, but the game was a powder keg waiting to explode much of the night. The Flyers scored to cut the lead in half during the late power play on the Hanzal penalty, and immediately after the goal Oliver Ekman-Larsson — for seemingly no reason other than that he’s spending the prime of his life playing meaningless March hockey in a desert wasteland — got in the face of Ryan White. Both White and OEL were tossed from the game, but it was a bit of a microcosm of how the game felt off the rails for no particular reason.
That was how much of the evening went. It seemed for much of the latter two periods that we couldn’t go more than five minutes without a borderline brawl breaking out in the corner. It came to a boiling point earlier in the third when Radko Gudas hit Shane Doan, knocking the Coyotes captain out with a similarly scary scenario to the one Giroux faced. It wasn’t really a bad hit — seemed like more of an accident than anything else to me — but Ekman-Larsson in particular took offense to it and it lit the fuse that made this game go from frustrating loss to holy-shit-I-never-realized-I-could-hate-the-Coyotes-this-much.
The story of this game will be what happens with Giroux, and early word is that he’s OK. But if he’s not, this is going to be one we remember as a lot more than just a disappointing late night loss against an irrelevant team. Might have to keep Martin Hanzal’s name pinned up on the wall for a while.
