The game at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center was tied 1-1 in the second period last night when New York Islanders’ forward Cole Bardreau stepped up to take a penalty shot. He’d been heading in on Ottawa’s net on a breakaway when defenceman Mark Borowiecki brought him down and so there he was, a 26-year-old in just his seventh NHL game about to skate in on Ottawa goaltender Craig Anderson and score his first big-league goal. “He’s a hard player to not root for,” Cory Wright advised later in his report for the Islanders’ website, “after nearly breaking his neck in college and nearly losing his hand to infection after an AHL fight.”

The goal turned out to be a decisive one in New York’s 4-1 victory. Also of note: Bardreau, who hails from Fairport, New York, goes into the books as just the seventh player in NHL history to score his debut goal on a penalty shot.

“I’m not going to lie,” Bardreau said after the game, “I was pretty nervous there looking up. But I just gripped and ripped it, and luckily it went in. It was just nice to get the monkey off the back. I’ll remember that one forever.”

The first man to score his first goal on a penalty shot in the NHL? Scotty Bowman, who did the deed 85 years ago this month in a game between a pair of teams that no longer exist. His goal, as it happens, was also the first penalty shot to be scored in the league.

Not that Scotty Bowman; this one, born in 1911 in Winnipeg, where he christened Ralph before going on to be nicknamed Scotty well before the legendary coach was out of diapers. The original Scotty B started his NHL career as a defenceman with the original Ottawa Senators at the start of the 1933-34 season. In the fall of 1934, when the Sens relocated and turned into the short-lived St. Louis Eagles, Bowman went with them. So it was that he was working the blueline on November 13, another Tuesday night, when the Montreal Maroons paid an early-season visit to the Arena.

The penalty shot was new that year to the NHL, adopted by the Board of Governors in September years after it had been standard practice in the Pacific Coast Hockey Association where it was (to quote a contemporary report from the Montreal Gazette) “born in the fertile brains of Lester and Frank Patrick.”

It wasn’t quite the same penalty shot that Cole Bardreau took last night. In 1934, once the referee determined that an attacking player had been fouled and prevented from taking a clear shot on goal, the wronged team could pick any player who wasn’t then in the penalty box to take the shot.

To do so, he stepped up to a ten-foot circle marked on the ice (just inside the blueline) 38 feet from the goal-line. The goaltender was allowed a certain mobility but not much: he couldn’t come out more than a foot from his line. The Gazette: “The sharpshooter can deliver the shot from the standing position or while skating full speed” — so long as he didn’t carry it beyond the confines of the circle.

In Frank Patrick’s pre-season opinion, the goaltender held a 60-40 advantage. One shot in three would go in, he thought.

He was almost right. The first penalty shot that season was a failed one: at Maple Leaf Gardens on November 10, the Leafs’ George Hainsworth foiled Armand Mondou of the Montreal Canadiens.

Three days later in St. Louis, the Maroons were up 1-0 in the second period when referee Bill Stewart called Montreal defenceman Stew Evans for tripping Eagle forward Syd Howe.

Hard to imagine why St. Louis coach Eddie Gerard would have decided that a defenceman who’d never scored in the league was the man to get the job done. Variously described at the time as just a youngster and both a chunky and a dynamic defenceman, Bowman, 23, was usually partnered on the blueline with Burr Williams. He must have had a shot, I guess, such that Gerard would have elected him over more seasoned goalscorers like Howe, Glenn Brydson, and Carl Voss.

Anyway, Bowman elected to take a run at the puck. Though St. Louis ended up losing the game 2-1 in overtime to a goal by Montreal’s Dave Trottier, Bowman did what he was supposed to do in the second period and tied the score, whipping the puck to goaltender Alec Connell’s glove-side. As The St. Louis Dispatch saw it, the puck sped“ankle high, like a bullet,” though the Star and Times placed the shot a little higher, near Connell’s “right shin.”

Either way, the people of St. Louis were pleased. “The fans stood on their chairs,” the Star and Times noted, “and yelled with glee.”