Duchene admits stellar goal made on the fly ‘surprised me’
‘You kind of just whack at the puck ... but there’s some luck involved, obviously’
The well-travelled Mike McKenna has seen this, that and the other thing during a professional career that has brought him to 19 teams over 14 seasons.
For all that, he said he has never seen a game-winning goal quite like Matt Duchene’s effort to cap the Ottawa Senators’ third-period comeback victory over the Philadelphia Flyers Tuesday. After his original shot was blocked, Duchene took a mid-air, backhanded swipe at the puck from the dot at the right faceoff circle, improbably hitting the roof of the net.
It was so unusual, it’s still turning heads around the NHL days later.
“That was a first,” said McKenna, who directly benefited from the Duchene strike, registering his first victory since being recalled from Belleville of the AHL.
“I’ve seen some pretty wild stuff. I played with a guy named Rob Schremp (a former Edmonton first-round pick) and he could do stuff like a lacrosse stick out there, just something he would do at practice, just screwing around really.”
McKenna actually felt for Flyers goaltender Anthony Stolarz, who made a desperation wave at the puck as it sailed past him, scarcely believing what Duchene had done.
“As a goalie, you see elite players do things like that on occasion that you just … raise your eyebrows and tip your cap to. As a goalie, man, you’re so used to picking up everything off the ice where the shot comes from. When it comes out of the air, that’s … really foreign. You’re not used to that.”
Duchene, who added a second-period goal and a first-period assist Thursday against the Rangers, has eight goals and 14 assists in 15 games in November, and is line for NHL player of the month honours. As for Tuesday’s game winner, though, he was trying to downplay it, wanting to deflect the attention back to the line of Brady Tkachuk, Mark Stone and Colin White, the unit that started the third-period rally.
When pressed about the goal, though, he suggested the “stars have to align” for it to happen.
“It surprised me,” he said. “You kind of just whack at the puck. I think some of the instinctual stuff you work on over your career takes over. But there’s some luck involved, obviously.”
Perhaps, if Duchene grew up in Ireland, hurling would have been his calling.