Chicken Nugget Incident Earns Pro Hockey Player a 10-Minute Penalty

Wednesday was School Education Day for the ECHL’s Toledo Walleye and one member of the home team got an education in the hockey rule book. 

The game against the Kalamazoo Wings began at 10:35 a.m. with 7,529 fans in attendance, many of them schoolchildren. Midway through the second period, one of the kids did something that might have earned them a detention if it had occurred at school. During a faceoff in the Toledo zone, an object went flying onto the ice. According to Mark Monroe of the Toledo Blade, it was a chicken nugget thrown by one of the kids in the crowd. Toledo’s Kirill Tyutyayev used his stick to nonchalantly flick the nugget off the ice and back over the glass. 

Something gets thrown onto ice -- at a morning kids game in Toledo -- and Kirill Tyutyayev shoots it back into crowd. Gets a 10-minute misconduct. Gonna be interesting to see if league gives supplemental discipline. It's pretty vanilla, but they don't like shooting into stands. pic.twitter.com/ci1cd4kilw

— Justin A. Cohn (@SportsiCohn) December 6, 2023

Though the video appears pretty innocuous, Tyutyayev was actually issued a 10-minute misconduct penalty for his actions. (Kalamazoo wasn’t awarded a powerplay, so the penalty wasn’t really anything more than a 10-minute enforced break for Tyutyayev.)

The game’s official box score notes that Tyutyayev was penalized for violating Rule 39.4, the rule that defines actions that can lead to a 10-minute misconduct penalty. But here’s the thing: The ECHL rulebook gives seven examples of actions that can lead to a misconduct call, and none of them really fit the bill here. The closest is the one that says a misconduct penalty can be assessed to a player who “deliberately throws any equipment out of the playing area.” But does a chicken nugget count as hockey equipment?