Evander Kane asked out of Winnipeg every offseason
Evander Kane wanted out of Winnipeg. Also, there are dinosaurs in “Jurassic World.”
Putting aside the obvious for a moment, it was never a question of “if” but rather one of “when” for a Kane trade from the Winnipeg Jets. The first rumors of a trade request from the talented winger to Jets brass arrived in 2011, with his agent denying it and Kane saying it started on “some blog.” After that, rumors that Kane wanted out of Winnipeg arrived nearly seasonally, until he was finally traded to the Buffalo Sabres this year.
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In February, his agent Craig Oster finally confirmed the “multiple” discussions Kane and GM Kevin Cheveldayoff had about moving him to another NHL team. In his introductory press conference with the Sabres, Kane himself said he had requested a trade in the past.
But in a new story with The Hockey News, Kane finally specified the depth of those requests: “Yeah, I asked for a trade every off-season in Winnipeg,” he told Ken Campbell.
That sounds like a lot of trade requests…
From The Hockey News, as published by the Winnipeg Free Press:
“There are lots of guys I could point to that everybody knows publicly who have done a lot worse or been accused of doing a lot worse things than I have,” Kane said in the interview. “But they don’t look like me. They don’t look like me.
“Jealousy is a disease. It really is.”
On the race question, Campbell made a broad, combined reference to both the hockey world and Winnipeg “where guys like Thomas Steen are heroes, and it’s a cauldron of narrow attitudes that Kane found a little difficult to handle.”
“I just didn’t feel as though (the Jets) had my back at all,” Kane said. “It would have been so simple to just squash it and put it to bed. It just became kind of a big deal.
“Common sense would dictate that I can afford a bill at a restaurant no matter what it is. There’d be no reason for me to do that. If you just default to your common sense, I think at the end of the day you’ll realize how ridiculous, how silly and how moronic it really sounded.”
Cue everyone in Winnipeg who gets livid whenever we point out the racial undertones of the heat Kane took as a Jet …
Well, glad that’s all behind us. Now that Evander Kane’s in Buffalo, and the players that came back to Winnipeg are thriving, we can all move on and hope for the best.
Or if you’re a Winnipeg radio station, openly celebrate the fact that Kane’s out up to six weeks:
Wait, so he didn’t feel welcome in Winnipeg?
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