Sometimes hockey officials are like exasperated parents of unruly children: They've just had enough.
Officials at the NHL game on Nov. 27 between the Ottawa Senators and Florida Panthers essentially ejected every player on the ice after defusing a large brawl that kept reigniting between different players.
Referee Garrett Rank announced that all 10 skaters on the ice during the third-period fight were given 10-minute misconduct penalties. Since there was only seven minutes left in the game, they were essentially ejections.
The melee started when the Panthers' Dmitry Kulikov slammed Ottawa's Brady Tkachuk into the boards, causing both teams to rush in and start swinging at each other. As the officials stood in between several players, they attempted to throw punches past them at opposing players.
The Panthers were leading by four goals at the time, and the two teams played shorthanded the rest of the way as Florida skated to a 5-0 victory.
The group of 10 players ejected for the fights were not even the only ones tossed from the game. Senators forward Zack MacEwen was ejected earlier in the third period.
It got so chippy that even a pair of brothers started exchanging words. Brady Tkachuk and his older brother, Florida's Matthew Tkachuk, were seen yapping at each other.
Meanwhile, their grandparents were in the stands. Their grandmother, Geraldine Tkachuk, was seen on the broadcast looking unimpressed with the fight.
“I mean, I don’t think it’s bad to play with emotion,” Brady Tkachuk told The Associated Press. “I think when this group plays with emotion, we’re a tough team to beat, and I think we rely on our emotion and it shows that we care, shows that we care about what we’re doing here and about the guy next to us.”
There were a total of 167 penalty minutes doled out by officials in the game, which barely merited a shrug from Florida head coach Paul Maurice.
"That's mild," Maurice told reporters afterward. "We only got to about 160-some minutes. It's gotta get into the 250s before it gets too squirrelly."
The NHL record for total penalty minutes in a game is 419 set in 2004 by the Senators and the Philadelphia Flyers.