The Vancouver Canucks paid tribute to the late John Garrett on Tuesday night in a variety of ways.
There were videos on the scoreboard, tributes on the broadcast, and even a selection of Garrett’s favourite foods in the press box.
The Canucks also made it rain hot dogs triggered by a round of John Garrett trivia, with Canucks superfan Marcia McNaughton successfully answering all three questions.
This fan answered the John Garrett trivia correct, so now it's raining hot dogs in Vancouver 🌭
For Cheech, of course 💙 pic.twitter.com/x7BUlBNBaC
— Sportsnet (@Sportsnet) October 21, 2026
The toughest of those questions was about the time Garrett got a ten-minute misconduct for trying to fight arguably the greatest hockey player of all time, Mario Lemieux.
Here’s the story of how that happened.
It was Lemieux’s rookie season in 1984-85, and he was making his home debut for the Pittsburgh Penguins on Oct. 17. Lemieux had already played on the road in losses to the Boston Bruins and Montreal Canadiens; now he was looking for his first win against the lowly Canucks.
Just 18 seconds into the game, Lemieux assisted on the opening goal. So, Gary Lupul tried to get under the skin of the 19-year-old forward, hounding him in the defensive zone.
Lemieux complained that Lupul had speared him twice.
“Lupul hit me twice in the stomach with his stick,” said Lemieux after the game to Arv Olson of the Vancouver Sun. “The first time I thought it was an accident. The second time I dropped my gloves.”
“I might have jabbed him,” Lupul admitted after the game. “But I was just trying to hold him to tie him up at the side of our net.”
Lupul was a feisty, scrappy player, but he was also five-foot-eight and couldn’t match Lemieux’s size and strength. Lemieux was pummelling the smaller player; someone needed to step in.
That someone was goaltender John Garrett.
“Gary Lupul’s my size, so I come diving over the top rope,” recalled Garrett nearly forty years later on After Hours with Scott Oake.
Garrett earned a two-minute minor for leaving his crease during an altercation and a game misconduct for being the third man in, but the penalties evened out with Lemieux receiving an extra roughing minor in addition to his fighting major.
“Lupul was an instigator at the time,” recalled Lemieux in 2002. “He just got under my skin a little bit and, being young and foolish, I dropped the gloves.”
In a way, Garrett was returning the favour from the previous season. Garrett’s one career fight happened to be against the Penguins in the previous season, when he took on agitator Gary Rissling in the midst of a dominant seven-point night by Patrick Sundstrom.
Garrett tried to tell his teammates to stay out of the fight, but Lupul missed the memo and jumped in to rescue his goaltender, earning a game misconduct for being the third man in, just as Garrett would against Lemieux.
“He’ll get his ass kicked”
Lupul, for his part, wasn’t impressed by Lemieux.
“If he ever takes on someone who knows how to fight, he’ll get his ass kicked,” said Lupul to Olson. “He didn’t land one [punch]. When he started swinging, I just ducked down and held my hands in front of my face.”
Lupul’s teammate, Michel Petit, wasn’t as lucky. In the fracas, he was sucker-punched by Penguins defenceman Rod Buskas and needed an estimated 50 stitches and plastic surgery to repair his lip.
Garrett never really got the chance to throw any punches, but he threw out a few choice words, as he recalled later to Oake on After Hours.
“I said, ‘Hey Mario, you’ll never make it. Anybody can score a thousand points in the Quebec league. You’ll never make it, you’re nothing but a big goon,'” said Garrett.
Lemieux finished his rookie season with 43 goals and 100 points in 73 games and went on to score well over a thousand points in the NHL. He finished his career with 690 goals and 1,723 points in 915 career games.
So Garrett was a little bit off in his assessment, but there were no hard feelings.
“Every time we see each other, he laughs about it with me, so that’s good,” recalled Garrett.