Brad Marchand has been called a rat for much of his NHL career, so the Florida Panthers saw an opportunity to shoot plastic rats at their new teammate.
After Florida’s Game 2 win against the Carolina Hurricanes in the Eastern Conference Finals, some Panthers fans in Raleigh, North Carolina littered the ice with the rats.
Evan Rodrigues and Aleksander Barkov shot them at Marchand as they were leaving the ice with the coaching staff looking on amused.
“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,” Panthers coach Paul Maurice told reporters, via ESPN’s Greg Wyshynski. “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.”
The rat is nothing new to the Panthers. It became synonymous with the franchise in 1995 when Scott Mellanby killed one in the locker room.
But it is new that the team chose Marchand as their next target.
“I don’t know how it started,” Rodrigues told reporters. “But I think the first game he was here, we won, we ended up doing it. And it’s just kind of become a little bit of a thing.”
Marchand added: “It’s just one of those things that happens organically. We don’t overthink it. We just have fun out there.”
The Panthers returned home and took a 3-0 series lead after a Game 3 win over Carolina in which Marchand scored. The forward, who was traded to Florida by the Boston Bruins at this year’s deadline, and the rest of his team is now just one win away from the Stanley Cup Final.
