Somewhere between the first and second period of Game 2, an Edmonton Oilers fan looked down at their fully cooked rotisserie chicken, looked up at the ice, and made a decision.
The play stopped while the officials convened and the chicken sat there.
Nobody has confirmed why it happened. The working theory, and it is just a theory, is that the chicken was meant to represent a cooked duck, as in the Anaheim Ducks are cooked, please go home. But that is speculation, and it may be giving this person too much credit. It is entirely possible they were just hungry, and things escalated. We don't know. We may never know. Some things are better left unexplained.
What we do know is that the Ducks scored shortly after the delay, which means the chicken jinxed the wrong team. If this was a statement, Anaheim responded to it. A poultry-based curse, completely self-inflicted, at a Stanley Cup playoff game, in front of 18,000 people.
It also opens up a conversation that hockey has never quite had properly, namely the debate over the greatest things ever thrown onto an NHL ice surface. The chicken did not invent this tradition; it merely joined a very specific and deeply unhinged lineage.
The octopus remains the gold standard. Detroit Red Wings fans have been throwing them since 1952, back when the eight tentacles represented the eight wins needed to claim the Cup. It became so institutionalized that the Joe Louis Arena eventually employed a dedicated person whose job—whose only job during playoff games—was to skate out and retrieve dead octopuses off the ice. That man should have a wing named after him somewhere.
Then there's the rat. Scott Mellanby killed a rat in the Panthers' locker room before a game in 1995, then scored two goals, and Florida fans immediately decided this meant they should throw plastic rats onto the ice every time their team scored. It got so out of hand during their 1996 playoff run that the NHL had to pass a rule against it because the stoppages were becoming unmanageable.
The league sat down and wrote something into the rulebook because of a plastic rat.
The waffle needs to be acknowledged even though there is nothing to say about it beyond the fact that it happened. Toronto Maple Leafs fans threw waffles onto the ice in 2011 to protest the team's performance. Not a symbol, or a prop, but just regular breakfast waffles, in quiet defeat.
Hats are fine. Moving on.
The rotisserie chicken ranks somewhere in the middle of all this, not because it lacks ambition but because the logistics are pretty impressive and deserve their own moment of recognition. Someone bought this chicken and got it past Rogers Place security. Held onto it through an entire period of playoff hockey. And then threw it. T
That is a sequence of events that required planning, patience, and a bag that arena security apparently did not look at closely enough, which is a separate issue somebody at Rogers Place should probably be looking into.
The Ducks scored after the delay. The chicken did nothing except stop a playoff game and become the only story anyone wanted to talk about afterward, which, depending on your perspective, means it worked perfectly or not at all.
No official word on whether the fan was removed. The chicken was not available for comment.
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