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It’s hard not to love the “Teddy Bear Toss” tradition that’s a staple at plenty of hockey games around the holiday season, including an OHL showdown that took place on Sunday. However, there’s one player who wasn’t feeling it and found himself kicked out of the game and benched for another as a result.
It’s been more than three decades since the marketing director for a junior hockey team in British Columbia dreamed up a new promotion in the form of the Teddy Bear Toss ahead of a game where fans were told to arrive with stuffed animals in tow and chuck them onto the ice after the team scored its first goal so they could be collected and donated to charity.
It didn’t take long for that particular stunt to spread across Canada and beyond, and a ton of junior and minor league hockey teams hold a Teddy Bear Toss each year.
As things currently stand, the Hershey Bears of the AHL are the gold standard, as the team has repeatedly broken its own record and even had to end a game early last season after setting the bar once again with 67,309 stuffed animals (the mark was once against surpassed when fans lobbed a grand total of 74,599 onto the ice back in January).
On December 1st, the OHL’s Sarnia Sting held a Teddy Bear Toss while hosting the Saginaw Spirit in a game where the visiting team pulled out to a 2-0 lead before the home crowd got the chance to shower the rink when Beckham Edwards netted a goal on the power play around four minutes in the second period.
However, there ended up being a Grinch on the rink in the form of Michael Misa, the 17-year-old Saginaw forward who’s expected to be one of the top picks in the 2025 NHL Entry Draft.
Misa started taking a slow lap around the rink as the stuffed animals began to fly and attempted to flick them back over the glass multiple times while ultimately succeeding on two of those attempts.
In doing so, he violated the OHL rule that bans players from purposefully sending any object that ends up on the ice into the crowd. He was ejected from the contest and subsequently hit with the one-game suspension he served when the Spirit faced off against the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds on Wednesday.
#OHL Disciplinary Action:
Saginaw’s Michael Misa has been suspended for one game as a result of actions (Game Misc., Shooting Objects out of Playing Surface) on Dec. 1 at Sarnia.
— Ontario Hockey League (@OHLHockey) December 4, 2024
The incident transpired almost a year to the day after an ECHL player was hit with a 10-minute misconduct for sending a chicken nugget back over the glass.
The Sting collected 4,663 stuffed toys, but Misa and the Spirit skated away with a 4-1 victory.