"What are they saying?"
The text had popped onto my phone most unexpectedly. This was June 27, 2014, in Philadelphia, deep into the evening after the Penguins and Predators had pulled off a trade that dwarfed in every way the NHL Draft that had just been conducted there: James Neal for Patric Hornqvist and throw-in Nick Spaling.
And the message that arrived was from Neal.
He'd already communicated with a few of his former teammates, not to mention friends and family, to try to cope with what had just occurred. He'd just been shoved out of a place where he'd felt he finally found a hockey home. He'd heard rumblings, as did all of us on that draft floor, that some with the Penguins' front office were branding him a bad influence in the locker room. He'd tried to begin burying that by reaching out to his new employers in Nashville.
But that wasn't why he reached out to a reporter. That wasn't the answer he wanted.
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