During Thursday’s game against the Ottawa Senators, Colorado Avalanche center Lars Eller skated across the ice in the closing minutes of the second period, playing quite well.
Eller followed his teammate Logan O’Connor and Sens blue Jake Sanderson as they raced for possession of the puck thrown across the length of the ice.
Both O’Connor and Sanderson thought it was icing and stopped skating as soon as the puck landed on Ottawa goaltender Mads Sogaard’s pads. But the umpires never blew the icing whistle, and when Sogaard left the puck open thinking the game was dead, Eller waltzed and shot the puck over the line to give Colorado a 5-2 lead.
After the game, the 33-year-old forward explained it as a fairly simple possibility.
“Everyone looked around. They waited for the whistle, but the whistle never came. So you don’t just drop the game and then see what happens,” Eller said.
To make matters worse, the goal didn’t seem to matter much: Colorado went up by three with just over 20 minutes left in the game, but the Senators came back in the third period.
Senses defenseman Travis Hamonic scored within the first three minutes of the final frame and captain Brady Tkachuk followed up on his timely goal with a powerplay goal with 6:42 left in time.
Unfortunately for everyone in Ottawa, they were so close to it, and Eller’s strange goal—his first in a Colorado jersey—was the winner.
Tkachuk defended Sogaard for misplay after the game.
“I mean it’s just one of the weirdest goals probably this year and we all believe that [Sogaard] not guilty. I feel terrible about him,” he said. “He was such a key player – it’s just a hell of a situation where both goalkeepers go down and he gets pushed. He is a young goalkeeper but he is our goalkeeper of the future and he will take us to the Stanley Cup and take us to the next level that we want to reach.
“We have all faith in him, all faith. It’s unbelievable how good a player he is already.”
Veteran goaltender Cam Talbot has been battling with injuries over the past few months and is currently out for another two weeks with a lower body injury, while Anton Forsberg is likely out for the season after being out in February for a terrible injury tore the MCL.
This forced the 22-year-old Sogaard to take the reins during Ottawa’s season-end quest for its first playoff berth since 2017. season.
Now, with the New York Islanders eight points behind the New York Islanders in second place on the wild card list with only 14 games left, Ottawa’s chances of making the playoffs have fallen to 1.1 percent. for MoneyPuck.
Source: sports.yahoo.com
