Sportsnet: Elliotte Friedman and Jeff Marek on the 32 Thoughts: The Podcast – Tort’s Tantrum Fallout & the Golden LTIR episode on if Erik Karlsson future is with the Pittsburgh Penguins and if a return to the Ottawa Senators be a possibility.
** NHLRumors.com transcription
Marek: “I wonder about Erik Karlsson through all of it. That’s the one guy that I keep coming back to. There’s a commitment from (Evgeny) Malkin. A commitment from Kris Letang. That’s the group that stayed. The one that I do wonder about is Erik Karlsson.
No question attached to any of this. That’s just, I’ll just lob that out there as my own feeling. That’s the one guy that I wonder about here, and his future with the Pittsburgh Penguins. I just don’t.”
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Friedman: “Well, it’s not going to be an easy one to move. It definitely isn’t.
Marek: “Oh, I you know.”
Friedman: “And, and, you know, I’ll say this, I think a lot, there’s gonna be a lot of focus on Ottawa. Like if there’s one team that you would think would consider it, it would be them with Daniel Alfredsson there.
Ottawa, I think did a lot of groundwork. And I think Ottawa would a lot, had a lot of conversations, not only about, you know, they made some subtractions but I also think they want to add, and people who are going to make them better right away.
It’s ever since I wrote that about the possibility, just in my head of Karlsson going back, there’s been a lot of feedback to me about people who think it would be a good idea and people who would think it wouldn’t be a good idea.
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But if it’s not Ottawa, it’s, it’s hard and don’t forget Karlsson has a lot of control here. It’s hard to see where it makes sense. I think the Sentaors are going to be a really, really busy team in the offseason. I think they had a lot of conversations that will kind of get punted into the summer. I know that I had people asking me if I made a Freudian slip on the show on Saturday night. No, that was not intentional. That was just a slip, but I do think they had conversations about the future.”
