The caller ID read 'Bill Zito.' On a Friday night. In the summer. 'I don't think he's calling me for an extension.' Inside Jonathan Huberdeau's life-changing summer, with MLarkinHockey:
It was Friday night, July 22. He had just finished a game of beer league hockey with his friends. Yes, NHL superstars like Huberdeau do mortal things in the offseason like play in a league with their best pals. They were hanging out in the parking lot when his phone rang.Huberdeau looked at his friends.“I don’t think he’s calling me for an extension at this time of night,” he said.
In the days that followed, Huberdeau did find the words. It helped that he had a longtime teammate in Weegar going with him in the trade. And, one after another, their new Flames teammates began reaching out, obviously excited. An offseason that had started sourly with Johnny Gaudreau’s departure and Tkachuk’s trade request had taken an upbeat turn with some high-impact players replacing them.
“It was my second home,” Huberdeau said. “My family, we used to spend every Christmas, three weeks, since I was a baby. So I was fortunate to play there for 10 years, and I knew the area before, playing there, living there. It just felt like home. A lot of people liked to come visit and obviously the lifestyle was great in Florida. The first two weeks after the trade, you think about all that and are a little sad, but then you think, ‘Life goes on,’ and you have to worry about what’s ahead.
“You want to sign a guy for a lot of years, you haven’t met him, so that was really nice of him to take a plane and come and see me in Montreal and then go right back,” Huberdeau said. “The dinner went well, we got along and I think he wanted to win right now with the moves he made, signing Nazem Kadri. And I think we have a really good team. That excited me. I liked how he wanted to build that team, and that made me want to stay there for a long time.