Two summers ago, I approached Brent Seabrook in the corner of a ballroom in the Hilton Chicago, and after the crowd of reporters disappeared and it was just me and him, I asked a very humiliating question to a very proud man.
You’re a three-time champion in the Stanley Cup, you’re an Olympian, you’d been adored by your teammates, but everyone’s someone thinks of when they hear your name is ‘the worst contract in the NHL’. Does it bother you?
I was obviously giving up on him. Athletics has just put that phrase in a heading in the rankings of the greatest albatrosses in hockey. Seabrook can be a prickly kind, so it played a bit with fire, but after all these years, I earned enough ropes from the man to pull something like that every now and then.
He did not bite.