A waiver revelation in the sauna
An hour before puck drop Feb. 17, Brad Hunt strolled into the Colorado Eagles’ visiting locker room in Calgary for his first AHL game in more than two months. He heard from across the room: “Hey, go look at your jersey.”
It wasn’t at Hunt’s stall. He looked around and noticed team staff sewing a “C” patch onto the chest.
“That’s the first time I saw it,” Hunt said Thursday, wearing an Avalanche practice jersey for the first time since being named captain of the AHL affiliate.
Nobody had told the 34-year-old journeyman in advance. He hadn’t been a captain of any team since junior hockey.
But there was no time to think about it in the moment. Hunt shrugged, donned the sweater with its updated swag and warmed up. “I didn’t really think too much about it until after the game, like what it meant,” he said.
That reaction about sums up Hunt’s 15-year hockey career, 10 of which have been spent bouncing between the NHL and AHL. Hunt has been rolling with the punches through stints with 10 organizations — whether it’s unexpected good news like being named captain, or cloudier developments like being placed on waivers.
The way he sees it, being along for the ride is fun, considering “I never thought I would be in the NHL.”
Growing up in British Columbia, Hunt breathed hockey but didn’t consider it a realistic career. His friend’s dad was in the Canadian Air Force, so he thought it would be cool to be a pilot someday.
“I dreamed to be in the NHL,” he said. “Whether that helped, I don’t know. But I think it was just something where you can tell kids, ‘Why give up?’ That’s just something that I never gave up.”
Bruce Boudreau, who coached Hunt in Minnesota and Vancouver, lauded his contributions as a teammate.
“Still comes to the rink every day, feeling great and wanting to play and loving the game,” Boudreau said. “How you can’t like a guy like that is beyond me.”
The reason Hunt was back with the Eagles to begin with was that he cleared waivers Feb. 12, after an anxious 24 hours. Any other team could have claimed him.
Hunt had been through the process before. In January 2017, he didn’t even know he was going on waivers when Nashville claimed him from St. Louis. He was in the sauna at the Blues’ practice facility when coach Craig Berube found him: “Hey, you’ve gotta go look at your phone.”
Hunt was confused. “I had, like, 15 missed calls from (general manager) Doug Armstrong,” he remembers. So Hunt called back. “He’s like, ‘Hey, you got claimed on waivers.’ I was like, ‘Huh?'”
Five minutes later, Predators general manager David Poile called with the details.
“If you’re a single guy, you just pack a suitcase and you’re gone,” said Hunt, whose son Colby was born two years later. “But if you have to try to explain to your family what’s going on, it makes it more stressful.”
So this time was different. Hunt was with the Avs in Tampa when he heard. He played that night with uncertainty hanging over him. Some players want to be claimed to continue playing in the NHL. But Hunt hoped to clear so that he could stay in Colorado and not uproot his family. He lives halfway between Denver and Loveland.
“It’s stressful because nobody knows what’s going to happen,” he said. “I have no idea if anybody can even see on a computer if some team is going to claim or not. I have no idea how it works. All I know is that there’s not really much information until 12 (the next day) hits and you’re waiting for a phone call.”
Waivers were how Jayson Megna ended up in Anaheim and the Eagles ended up without a captain earlier this season. But Hunt cleared, clearing the way for him to inherit Megna’s “C.”
It also allowed him to stick around longer for a winning organization that’s pursuing something Hunt has only come close to achieving. Twice in his career, he has been on NHL teams that made the Stanley Cup Final: Nashville in 2017 and the expansion Golden Knights the next year. He didn’t appear in a playoff game for either team, but he traveled with both and watched both Stanley Cup Finals from the press box as a No. 7 defenseman.
The Predators lost in six games. Vegas lost in five.
“It was fascinating,” he said.