Brian Boucher felt from the moment of overtime that this game was still running a little, and he knew it from non-public experience.
Twenty years ago, Boucher in the purpose of the Philadelphia Flyers when they defeated the Pittsburgh Penguins in the longest playoff game in NHL fashion history, a five-hour overtime thriller. He was on the defendants’ bench Tuesday night for nbc Sports’ broadcast of the second-longest fashion game and the fourth of all times when the Tampa Bay Lightning beat the Columbus Blue Jackets at 10:27 a.m. in the fifth overtime.
“He seemed to calm down like that,” Boucher told The Associated Press on the phone Wednesday. “You may start to see some players as the game progressed, they scoffed a little bit of the linsemen and it almost gets to the point where it’s fun to play in a game like that.”
Halfway through the fourth overtime, Boucher took the kind of breath he couldn’t take in 2000 and summarized how the players felt on the ice.
“What you want stays in the brain too, the physical exertion, the cramps that begin to appear,” Boucher said. “It was at this moment that the frame began to decompose.”
Brayden Point’s purpose ended the Lightning-Blue Jackets game seconds after Boucher’s game, which ended with a shot to the wrist through Keith Primeau beyond Ron Tugnutt.
With Boucher in the middle of the track and 2000 Flyers in front of Keith Jones in the studio, the screen had a direct connection to the NHL’s longest game since the 1930s.
Boucher made 57 stops of the record of 85 stops of Columbus goalkeeper Joonas Korpisalo. But from Toronto’s inner Scotiabank Arena, he was able to describe how Tampa Bay’s Korpisalo and Andrei Vasilevskiy literally warmed up.
“You can’t believe with this device how hot the inside of your mask makes, the inside of your pads and how much sweat those guys have,” Boucher said. “It’s almost unlikely he won’t start to feel those cramps. But they were encouraged.”
While Urka was biting dessert for a little sugar after a wrong resolution of skipping lunch, Jones described how the concessions were empty at the old Pittsburgh Mellon Arena when the Flyers and Penguins reached the fifth overtime. He laughed more than a little about being (technically) on the ice for Primeau’s goal, even though he had turned around to skate to the bench.
“I didn’t see that purpose until the next day, ” said Jones. “The total bench jumps on the ice, Boosh is celebrating and I ended up heading towards the pile. I think we were going to have too many men on the ice because I had no idea why everyone left the bench.”
On a night when the Blue Jackets’ defenseman, Seth Jones, played 65 minutes, Keith Jones recalled the numbers of his 37:50 action 20 years earlier: “I didn’t do any shots at goal. I missed two shots. The only thing. I didn’t. take blocked hits. I didn’t get hit.”
It’s not exactly a line of statistics that will go into history. But the game between Lightning and Blue Jackets will undoubtedly be in component because it is the fourth-longest in NHL history and given the exclusive cases in which it is played impartially without assistance.
Boucher had a front row seat and, if more than 4 months to go, he would prepare those players to play better in a match that lasted more than 150 minutes.
“I felt those boys look really good,” Boucher said. “I think they looked a lot bigger than we wore in 2000, and maybe it’s because of their conditioning and the way those athletes have come in in 20 years.”
Boucher and Jones are the only links in this playoff series about the winning aspect of this 2000 game. Arizona coach Rick Tocchet, St. Louis coach Craig Berube, Montreal assistant Luke Richardson, Pittsburgh assistant Mark Recchi and Philadelphia television analyst Chris Therien were betting on the Flyers at the time.
“There are a lot of guys who were part of this epic game and who are still worried about the game,” Boucher said. ‘I’m not surprised that the guys are still worried about the game, I’m not surprised that some of them are head coaches, and I’m not surprised that Jonesy is doing what he does in our studios as one of the wonderful studio analysts. because all those kids love the game.”