Warning To NHL Mascots: Don't Mess With Kraken's Buoy - Or John Forslund

Don't believe for a minute that the Seattle Kraken don't employ enforcers, willing to knock misbehaving opponents on their ass.

One is Buoy, the Kraken mascot, who showed his toughness at the NHL All-Star Game Fan Fest this weekend in Toronto.

The festivites included a mascot street hockey game, which at one point turned ugly.

As captured by the Buffalo News and Kitwana Lion in these screengrabs, Sabretooth wasn't looking where he was going as he went off for a line change.

Buoy didn't appreciate being bumped into. When the Kraken Troll got up all in Sabretooth's business, this feline became pretty toothless.

You Wouldn't Like Him If You Block His View

To find the other Kraken roughneck, look high above the ice at Climate Pledge Arena. He's right there in the home TV booth, wearing a suit, eyeglasses and a headset. No, not former players Eddie Olczyk or J.T. Brown. The take-no-prisoners individual we speak of is play-by-play announcer John Forslund.

John Forslund? The "That's Kraken Hockey, Baby" guy? The "Hey, Hey, Whaddaya Say" guy? The affable broadcaster who's as good doing what he does as anybody who does what he does?

Yes. We know this because of a story John told on the KISW-FM "BJ & MIGs mornings" show. For context, though, we first have to explain who "Tricolo" is.

Back in the 1980s, the AHL farm team of the Montreal Canadiens was located in Sherbrooke, Quebec. Because attendance wasn't what Sherbrooke management hoped it would be, the team introduced a new mascot, "Tricolo," in 1987.

A Montreal Canadiens blog, Habs Eyes On The Prize , described Tricolo as a "blue-furred, rosy-cheeked, puppy-dog-eyed amorphous mascot sporting the classic Canadiens jersey that the AHL team wore at the time." Tricolo may have looked like a puppy, but he acted like a cross between a pit bull and a Karen.

Tricolo antagonized opponents sent to the penalty box, sometimes waving a rubber chicken on a stick. He once rushed an opponent's bench while wielding a shovel. When the league objected, "Tricolo showed up at centre ice with arms and legs chained and wearing an orange jumpsuit."

Three teams filed official complaints. Worst of all, Tricolo openly mocked an opponent of Japanese descent with racist stereotypes. Almost as bad, one of Tricolo's routines was pretending to fire a machine gun at a referee.

You get the idea.

Forslund Helps Tricolo Find A New Seat

Inside the costume was a man named Claude Bernier. Claude, and Tricolo, got their comeuppance from none other than John Forslund.

"It was in a playoff game in Sherbrook, Quebec," recalled Forslund. "I was working for the Springfield Indians at the time. This 'thing' came up, it looked like the old Expos mascot (Youppi!, now the adopted mascot of the Canadiens).

"It was hanging out on the desk of the little booth I had. I couldn't see. I asked him to move; he looked back at me and wouldn't move. So I leveled him, I took him out. He went two rows down."

Like the professional he is, John didn't miss a beat during the beatdown. "I still maintained the call. I never stopped. A (security guard) is tapping me on the shoulder and I just kept going. It made The Hockey News ."

And now, decades later, it's made The Hockey News again. We're sure NHL mascots would never act so obnoxiously. But just to be on the safe side, someone please read them this column.