Twenty years ago, Brian Boucher was in goal for the Philadelphia Flyers when they beat the Pittsburgh Penguins in the longest playoff game in modern NHL history, a five-overtime thriller.
He was between the benches on Tuesday for NBC Sports’ broadcast of the second-longest modern game and fourth all-time when the Tampa Bay Lightning beat the Columbus Blue Jackets 10 minutes, 27 seconds into the fifth overtime.
Halfway through the fourth overtime, Boucher took the kind of breath he was unable to back in 2000 and summed up what the players on the ice were feeling.
Photo: AFP
“The thing you’ve got to keep in mind, too, the physical exertion, the cramps that start to come in,” Boucher said. “It was around this time that the body started to break down.”
Brayden Point’s goal ended the Lightning-Blue Jackets game 95 seconds short of the time of Boucher’s game that finished with Keith Primeau’s wrist shot past Ron Tugnutt.
With Boucher at center ice and 2000 Flyers forward Keith Jones in the studio, the broadcast had a direct connection to the NHL’s longest game since the 1930s.
Photo: Dan Hamilton-USA TODAY
Boucher made 57 saves compared with Columbus goaltender Joonas Korpisalo’s Stanley Cup playoff-record 85, but from inside Scotiabank Arena in Toronto, he could describe how Korpisalo and Tampa Bay’s Andrei Vasilevskiy were heating up, literally.
“You can’t imagine with that gear how hot it gets inside your mask, inside your pads and the amount of much sweat that these guys have,” Boucher said. “It’s almost impossible not to start to feel those cramps, but they’ve both been sharp.”
On a night that Blue Jackets defenseman Seth Jones played a game-high 65 minutes, Keith Jones recalled the numbers from his 37:50 of action 20 years prior: “I had zero shots on goal. I had two missed shots. It was the only thing. I had no blocked shots. I had no hits.”
Not exactly a stat line that will go down in history, but the game between the Lightning and Blue Jackets will, no doubt, in part because it’s the fourth-longest in NHL history and given the unique circumstances of it being played at a neutral site with no fans in attendance.
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