Predators Fan Ships Dead Catfish to NHL to Protest Goalie Interference Call

A Nashville Predators fan spent $140 bucks to mail a dead catfish to the NHL office and nothing has ever made more sense.

Goalie interference review has been an absolute disaster across the league this season. With a vague definition of the actual rule and an even more confusing application of it, no one has any idea why some goals count and others do not—which is, I don't know, pretty important, probably?

It came to a head when Nashville had a last-second game-tying goal disallowed against the Panthers on Tuesday after a lengthy review determined that there was interference on Roberto Luongo. It was maybe (probably) the most egregious goaltender interference review of the year (and that's saying a hell of a lot considering how asinine the application of this rule has been), so naturally the only appropriate response was to UPS a catfish carcass across the border.

In response to that call, Preds fan Briley Meeks took inspiration from a post from a Predators' fan page on Facebook which suggested—as a joke, apparently—that someone should send a dead catfish through the mail to the NHL head offices in Toronto.

According to David Ammenheuser The Tennessean, Meeks loves a good practical joke and, after some quick consideration, decided to drop $7.25 on the fish and $134.50 on shipping costs before packing the southern delicacy into a cooler and shipping it to her friends at the NHL offices.

Briley acknowledges that the juice was easily worth the squeeze.

"It was worth every penny!" she said. "I feel like my Preds were robbed and the look on their faces last night when Toronto overturned that goal broke my heart!"

Meeks gloriously told Greg Wyshynski of ESPN that her motivation was to make the NHL’s situation room, not the referees, pay for their error in judgment on the disallowed tally.

"One minute I was sitting on my couch, the next minute I was going to buy fish and shipping it to Canada. It wasn't the refs in the game that made the call. It was Toronto. So they deserve the dead catfish."

The catfish tradition in Nashville started back in 2003 when a fan was first caught hurling a dead one onto the ice during a series against the Red Wings—whose fans notoriously enjoy tossing the occasional octopus onto the playing surface mid-game in Detroit.

During Nashville's first-ever march to the Stanley Cup Final last spring, catfish were flying on the ice throughout the team's four playoff rounds and even resulted in a fan being charged after he snuck a fish carcass in his compression shorts and launched it onto the ice at PPG Paints Arena in Pittsburgh during Game 1.

With the Preds looking poised to make a deep playoff run once again in 2018, we'll be getting our fair share of inspirational dead-animal tossing stories, I'm sure.