On October 8, 1995, the Florida Panthers were getting ready in their locker room at the old Miami Arena for their home opener against the Calgary Flames. The building had seen better days, and that included the occasional uninvited guest — that night, a rat ran across the locker room floor in front of the entire team.
Right winger Scott Mellanby reacted the way a hockey player reacts to anything moving fast near his stick: he wound up and one-timed it into the wall, killing it instantly. The room was already tense before the rat showed up, and Mellanby later admitted he barely thought about it — he just reacted on instinct.
He kept the same stick. That night, Mellanby scored two goals with it in a 4-3 win over Calgary. Afterward, Panthers goaltender John Vanbiesbrouck was talking to reporters in the cramped locker room, glanced at the blood-stained wall, and off-handedly told them Mellanby had pulled off the first "rat trick" in NHL history — a play on the standard hat trick, one goal short.
The story ran in the local paper the next day, and Panthers fans took it from there. At the following home game, a fan threw a plastic rat onto the ice after a goal. Then more fans did the same thing at the game after that. By the time Florida made its improbable run to the 1996 Stanley Cup Final — in just the franchise's third season — thousands of plastic rats were raining onto the ice after every single goal, an entire arena's tradition built from one player's reflexes in a locker room.
The rat storms got large enough, and disruptive enough to game delays, that the NHL changed its rules in the following offseason to let referees penalize the home team for fans throwing objects onto the ice. But the rat itself never really left South Florida. Decades later, the Panthers still lean into the legend — rat-themed merchandise, nods to the tradition during deep playoff runs, and a story players still get asked about at alumni events. All from a rodent that picked the worst possible night to run through an NHL locker room.