Two summers ago I approached Brent Seabrook in the corner of a ballroom at the Hilton Chicago and when the crowd of reporters had disappeared and it was me and him, I asked a very proud man a very humiliating question.
You’re a three-time Stanley Cup champion, you’re an Olympian, you’re damn almost adored by your teammates, but all that comes to mind when they hear your name is ‘worst contract in the NHL’. Does that bother you?
I was harassing him, of course. The Athletic had just put that sentence in a headline in a ranking of the greatest albatrosses in hockey. Seabrook can be a spiky species, so it played with fire a bit, but after all these years I had made enough rope with the man to pull something like that every now and then.
He doesn’t bite.