Everyone’s seen an elite sniper pick a spot and rifle the puck into the top corner of the net, and thought “welp, nothing the goalie could have done there.” This isn’t one of those goals.
Texas Stars (AHL affiliate of the Dallas Stars) defenseman Joel Hanley scored one of the strangest goals you’ll ever see last night in a game last night against the Manitoba Moose. Clearly not even trying to score, Hanley was the beneficiary of some of the weirdest (and best) puck luck in recent memory.
In case you were wondering what puck luck looks like... (assisted by stanchion) pic.twitter.com/crJzugG0m8
— Texas Stars (@TexasStars) March 14, 2019
Hanley dumped the puck into the corner, where it took a long, strange bounce off of the stanchion, then somehow bounced on a curve and into the net. The goalie, trying to play the puck, was behind his own net in anticipation of it banking around.
The bounce off the stanchion is weird enough, but how about the curved roll into the net? It’s unclear from the video angles provided, but one possible explanation is that it somehow went off the stanchion and then hit a divot on the ice on the way down. The odds of the puck taking those two very wild bounces are astronomically low, but if not that, this was some serious voodoo.
