Chickens rule the roost in hometown of Knights’ Ryan Carpenter

You’ve heard about hockey fans in Detroit throwing an octopus onto the ice to celebrate a Stanley Cup playoff victory, and more recent imitators such as the puckheads in Nashville, Tennessee, who hurl catfish over the Plexiglas whenever the Predators beat the Red Wings in the postseason.

But what about chickens?

They don’t throw chickens onto the ice at the RDV Sportsplex in Maitland, Florida, where Golden Knights forward Ryan Carpenter skated growing up. Not yet anyway.

Maitland is near Carpenter’s hometown of Oviedo in Seminole County, a long centering pass from Orlando. Besides Carpenter, Jacksonville Jaguars quarterback Blake Bortles and alligators, Oviedo is mostly known for chickens.

Chickens roam unchecked through Oviedo’s historic downtown district, which one assumes is far removed from where they keep the gators. There are so many crossing the road they sometimes stop traffic.

“It’s a really small town,” Carpenter said of Oviedo, population 33,442.

“It’s know for chickens runnin’ around downtown — pretty funny. “I don’t know if there’s a Popeyes chicken or something down there.”

I was told that roosters are used on road signs welcoming visitors to Oviedo, and there are T-shirts and coffee mugs and bumper stickers that say “I brake for Oviedo chickens.”

But based on the “Rocky” movies, it would be hard to catch a chicken and throw it onto the ice, unless it’s toward the end of the training montage before the second Apollo Creed fight.

Fateful start

A lot of hockey people had been asking Ryan Carpenter questions about his former team, the San Jose Sharks, in the run-up to the second-round playoff series against the Knights.

Most were about being placed on waivers by San Jose on Dec. 12, and being claimed by the Knights the next day and becoming a valuable cog in the Vegas ice hockey machine that continues to gather steam.

Few were about the other side’s point of view on the grim night of Oct. 1.

That was the night the Sharks beat the Knights 5-3 in a preseason game at T-Mobile Arena that started at 5 p.m.

Carpenter assisted on the Sharks’ second goal. He didn’t mention it during our conversation.

The shooting at the Route 91 Harvest festival just down the street began about two hours after the final whistle.

“We must have missed it by just an hour,” Carpenter said about the short return flight to San Jose on that fateful night. “I think there were some media guys who were still around, who stayed here.

“That close to being here when it happened — it just puts life into perspective.”

Paid in horses

A couple of hockey writers were discussing what star forward James Neal might be paid if the Knights don’t let him skate out of town at season’s end as an unrestricted free agent.

One said it probably would be a lot.

The other said Neal probably wouldn’t be paid in horses.

The first got a quizzical look.

Las Vegas hockey fans who were around when the Thunder terrorized the old International Hockey League with a flurry of goals, fighting majors and bikini contests between periods might recall when longtime NHL goaltender Clint Malarchuk was paid in horses by his friend and former Thunder general manager Bob Strumm.

“Strumm sweetened the deal by offering me a signing bonus,” writes the “Cowboy Goalie” in his book, “Matter of Inches” (which is a fantastic read, by the way). “I asked him if he could pay it out in horses — a strange request, but if I was going to build a life in Nevada, I’d need a proper ranch.

“Strumm agreed to throw in two horses that year and another horse for every year I played with the Thunder after that.

“I think it might have been the first pro contract with livestock involved.”

In the book, former Las Vegas fan favorite Malarchuk recalls a conversation he had with a local hockey reporter.

“I told him I was going through a nasty divorce, and that if she wanted to take half of what I owned, I knew which half of the horse she could have.”

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Contact Ron Kantowski at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow @ronkantowski on Twitter.