NHL players reportedly contemplated retirement to attend Olympic Games
I don't think it's any sort of a secret how badly the NHL players wanted to attend the Olympic Games in Beijing this February. We have seen players like Connor Hellebuyck, Patrick Kane and, most recently, Brad Marchand speak about how it was important for them to get the chance to represent their countries and to pursue that elusive Olympic Gold medal.
According to Sportsnet's Elliotte Friedman during the "32 Thoughts" segment on Hockey Night in Canada, some NHLers were contemplating drastic measures to be able to defy the NHL and attend anyway.
"I was just talking to a couple of other players and they told me one of the things, just to give you an idea of how they felt about it, one of the things a few of them asked was, 'Could we retire or find some way to void our contracts, go play the Olympics and find a way to come re-sign?' And a couple of them said, could they retire and come back. They also asked, 'Could we be in a situation where we could ask to be put on waivers for the purposes of termination and then come back after the Olympics and re-sign with our team?'
While this line of thinking is definitely way outside of the box, it does provide some insight as to how important this opportunity was for players.
"One of them kind of laughed and said to me they were told, 'You think the NHL is ever going to allow you to try anything like that? There is not a chance,'" Friedman said.
The idea that players would be willing to derail their season for a chance to travel to Beijing seems pretty farfetched, especially when you consider that some guys would probably not even be able to return to their current NHL clubs for a full year after they departed. Nevermind the potential salary cap implications that could arise.
"I just thought it was pretty interesting that that's the kind of questions the players were asking, that's how badly they wanted to play, they were trying to find any loophole they could to try to find a way to get overseas," Friedman said. "But the NHL was wise to these kinds of plans."
Certainly not something I would have imagined could ever have realistically occurred, but it's wild to think about nevertheless.
