Canada's Jonathan Toews celebrates his penalty-shot goal against the United States on December 27, 2006.
photo: Jani Rajamaki/IIHF
What Mario Lemieux did exactly 37 years ago today, on December 31, 1988, remains unique and unimaginably amazing. Playing for the Pittsburgh Penguins in the NHL, he scored five goals in a game, against New Jersey. Incredibly, each goal came under different circumstances—even-strength, power-play, short-handed, empty net, and penalty shot.
No player has done that before or since, and no player in an IIHF event has pulled off the “quinella,” as it came to be known
But what about a World Junior team? Has any team scored five goals in a game, each under those five different circumstances? The answer is no. The closest situation we have is four, when Canada defeated the United States 6-3 on December 27, 2006, in Mora, Sweden. Even still, that game represents a special set of circumstances.
Think first about degree of difficulty. If you had to rank toughest to easiest way to score of the five possibilities, you would likely say penalty shot is the toughest (rarest), followed by short-handed goal, empty-net goal, power-play goal, and even strength (most common).
Consider there have been nearly 2,900 World Junior games played in more than 49 years of competition. But in that time there have been only 68 penalty shots called and only 26 goals scored.
In that December 27, 2006 CAN-USA game, Jonathan Toews scored the penalty shot goal early in the third period, and it was huge. Canada had built a 3-0 lead only to see the U.S. mount a comeback, but this Toews goal gave the Canadians a bit of breathing room to make it a 4-2 score.
The stubborn U.S., however, continued to fight, and a Bill Sweatt goal four minutes later made it close again. Darren Helm scored at 18:17 to make it 5-3, and then he added an empty-netter at 19:03 to close out the scoring.
Canada scored a 5-on-5 goal (Steve Downie) and PP goal (Tom Pyatt) in the first period, but they never got one short-handed, falling one goal short of Mario’s quinella.
In the other 25 games in which a penalty shot goal was scored in World Junior history, each was eliminated from quinella consideration for different reasons. Of course, the team has to score five goals in the game. And the team almost certainly has to win the game (to score the empty-netter), and the score has to be close. A 7-2 win isn’t going to get the team that empty-net chance.
The only other remotely close game to a quinella was the Czech/Slovak-Canada game of January 4, 1993. The blended nations won, 7-4, and they had a PS goal courtesy of David Vyborny midway through the second period. But all other goals were even strength, so this isn’t much of a close call at all.
And short-handed goals, while common as opposed to rare, are still very hard to come by. At last year’s World Juniors, for instance, there were only eight short-handed goals in 29 games. The previous year, five shorties.
Last week's thrilling 7-5 Canada win over Czechia might well have been exactly the kind of game to produce a quinella, but only three kinds of goals were scored—even strength, power play, empty net. Under current rules, you can even add a sixth kind of goal—shootout. That just made a near impossible challenge even more so because that would require a miraculous late-game comeback to produce the overtime (i.e., two late goals after surrendering an empty netter), with a score of at least 5-5. Probably safe to say that’s never going to happen.
But hockey can produce wild results, so never say never!
No player has done that before or since, and no player in an IIHF event has pulled off the “quinella,” as it came to be known
But what about a World Junior team? Has any team scored five goals in a game, each under those five different circumstances? The answer is no. The closest situation we have is four, when Canada defeated the United States 6-3 on December 27, 2006, in Mora, Sweden. Even still, that game represents a special set of circumstances.
Think first about degree of difficulty. If you had to rank toughest to easiest way to score of the five possibilities, you would likely say penalty shot is the toughest (rarest), followed by short-handed goal, empty-net goal, power-play goal, and even strength (most common).
Consider there have been nearly 2,900 World Junior games played in more than 49 years of competition. But in that time there have been only 68 penalty shots called and only 26 goals scored.
In that December 27, 2006 CAN-USA game, Jonathan Toews scored the penalty shot goal early in the third period, and it was huge. Canada had built a 3-0 lead only to see the U.S. mount a comeback, but this Toews goal gave the Canadians a bit of breathing room to make it a 4-2 score.
The stubborn U.S., however, continued to fight, and a Bill Sweatt goal four minutes later made it close again. Darren Helm scored at 18:17 to make it 5-3, and then he added an empty-netter at 19:03 to close out the scoring.
Canada scored a 5-on-5 goal (Steve Downie) and PP goal (Tom Pyatt) in the first period, but they never got one short-handed, falling one goal short of Mario’s quinella.
In the other 25 games in which a penalty shot goal was scored in World Junior history, each was eliminated from quinella consideration for different reasons. Of course, the team has to score five goals in the game. And the team almost certainly has to win the game (to score the empty-netter), and the score has to be close. A 7-2 win isn’t going to get the team that empty-net chance.
The only other remotely close game to a quinella was the Czech/Slovak-Canada game of January 4, 1993. The blended nations won, 7-4, and they had a PS goal courtesy of David Vyborny midway through the second period. But all other goals were even strength, so this isn’t much of a close call at all.
And short-handed goals, while common as opposed to rare, are still very hard to come by. At last year’s World Juniors, for instance, there were only eight short-handed goals in 29 games. The previous year, five shorties.
Last week's thrilling 7-5 Canada win over Czechia might well have been exactly the kind of game to produce a quinella, but only three kinds of goals were scored—even strength, power play, empty net. Under current rules, you can even add a sixth kind of goal—shootout. That just made a near impossible challenge even more so because that would require a miraculous late-game comeback to produce the overtime (i.e., two late goals after surrendering an empty netter), with a score of at least 5-5. Probably safe to say that’s never going to happen.
But hockey can produce wild results, so never say never!