Thursday night's game between the Jets and Bruins delivered one of the funniest and most bizarre sequences of this NHL season, and it was a real journey for the stick of Winnipeg's Mark Scheifele.
During the second period of the contest in Manitoba, Scheifele was hanging in front of the Bruins' net waiting for a scoring opportunity when he had his stick launched right out of his hands and straight into the netting behind the goal. The unexpected projectile came as result of a superhuman stick lift from Boston defenseman Zdeno Chara.
Chara stands at 6-foot-9 and is still one of the strongest defensemen in the hockey league even at 41 years old, but the violence with which Scheifele's lumber was rocketed into orbit is nothing short of spectacular.
That preposterous lift-off would have been spectacular on its own, but the story doesn't end there. That's because Scheifele's stick managed to escape the netting just seconds later, plummeting to the ice and landing behind the Bruins' net with a loud clang.
Realizing that he wasn't going to get the interference penalty call that he so desperately wanted, Scheifele proceeded to reclaim possession of his stick, which somehow remained in one piece, and then promptly scored a goal with that stick on the same shift. Scheifele gave the Jets a 2-1 lead with a little tap-in on an ensuing rush back into Boston's end.
In basketball, they use the saying "ball don't lie" when discussing the karmic equilibrium of the sport, but maybe the phrase should be "stick don't die" in this particular hockey sequence. Not even Chara's Old Man Strength was enough to keep this intergalactic stick from getting on the scoreboard.
