Connor McDavid's wife seemingly shades Florida Panthers: 'Why is Alberta rat-free?'
As the final fists were thrown and players were being ejected from Game 3 of the Stanley Cup Final Monday night, the wife of the game's biggest star, the
Edmonton Oilers
' Connor McDavid, subtly chirped the Florida Panthers team on their way to a convincing 6-1 win.
In a departure from her typically aesthetically curated and polished Instagram account, clothing and interior designer Lauren Kyle McDavid posted a screenshot of a Google Gemini AI response to her query: 'Why is Alberta rat-free?'
The screenshot goes on to explain that
a provincial program
to monitor the Saskatchewan border, combined with strict enforcement and trapping, has led to the province being 'essentially rat-free' for 75 years. Rats are not even permitted as pets in Alberta, but are permitted at zoos, universities or for research purposes.
Lauren Kyle weighs in 😂
pic.twitter.com/f1ZlKzdoLY
However, for those unfamiliar, the rat has been an unofficial Panthers' mascot for 30 years, and, more recently, the term has been one of the many less savoury monikers applied to the Panthers' Brad Marchand, regarded by peers and critics as one of the antagonistic and bothersome players in the NHL. He picked it up
early in his career
when drawing comparisons to Ken 'The Rat' Linesman, who played a similar style of hockey and famously
bit the nose of
Edmonton's Lee Fogolin in 1984.
Opposing fans will insist the nickname also alludes to Marchand's nose, which also inspired another early sobriquet:
Nose Face Killah,
a play on Ghost Face Killah, a member of the rap group Wu-Tang Clan.
The Nova Scotia native might be one of the few NHL players to have a nickname bestowed upon him by a sitting U.S. President. After the Boston Bruins won the 2011 Stanley Cup in Marchand's rookie year, Barack Obama referred to him as
'a little ball of hate'
during the team's subsequent visit to the White House.
As for how the club and its fan base embraced the rat as one of its symbols, you have to go back to the 1995 season when Panthers' forward Scott Mellanby used a slapshot to kill a rat found in the club's dressing room before a game. He went on to score two goals with the same stick that night, leading goalie John Vanbiesbrouck to later joke that his teammate had scored a 'rat trick' — a play on the hockey term for hat trick, when a player nets three goals in a game.
The next time Mellanby scored on home ice, someone tossed a fake rat on the ice, and it soon became a practice that became entrenched in the team's run to the Stanley Cup Final in the spring of 1996, the year of the rat, on the Chinese zodiac. The NHL eventually instituted a rule against it, but some fans continue to do it after victories. According to
the league
, some fans are known to stock up on rubber or plastic rats at Halloween or order them in bulk online.
The tradition continued Monday night as dozens of plastic rats, along with refuse from the stands, rained down on the ice following a fight-filled Game 3.
Appropriately, the Panthers' original mascot is Stanley C. Panther, but in 2014, the club introduced Viktor E. Ratt as a secondary mascot in homage to the unintentional rat legacy. Merchandise stores at Amerant Bank Arena sell t-shirts, hats and large gold chains with rats dangling from them.
Kyle McDavid wasn't in Sunrise, Fla., to see the ice showered with debris. She, along with the wives and girlfriends of several other Oilers, were attending a bachelorette party in Greece for Celeste Desjardins, fiancée to Edmonton forward Leon Draisaitl, per
Daily Hive Vancouver
. But she has attended several playoff home games at Rogers Place.
'The energy is just unreal. Everyone's on edge, the fans are fully dialled in, and you can feel how much it means to people,' she told
ELLE Canada
during the Western Conference final against the Dallas Stars in late May.
'I love being part of that. It's emotional, exciting and a little chaotic in the best way.'
Game 4 in the best-of-seven final is Thursday night, 8 p.m. ET, back at the Panthers' barn. Florida leads the series 2-1. Game 5 returns to Edmonton on Saturday night.
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