Eakin hopes to stick with Flames
As he readied for a training camp tryout with the Calgary Flames, Cody Eakin was considering a trim.
His better half, Hanna, persuaded her red-headed hubby to stick with his almost shoulder-length hockey hair.
“I was going to cut it off this summer and my wife told me no,” Eakin said. “She said, `While you're still playing, you gotta keep 'er going. It's kind of turned into your thing.' It started a long time ago, but it definitely stands out a little bit. It always stands out with this colour, right? So I just like to have a little fun with it.”
With that hard-to-miss mullet flapping from the back of his helmet and a moustache to match, Eakin is aiming to prove that he can still play at the highest level. He's in town on a professional tryout offer.
While most of the others are simply tuning up for the season, Eakin has roughly two more weeks to convince the Flames he deserves a contract offer. He isn't necessarily being judged on his offensive output but it couldn't have hurt his case that he scored in Sunday's split-squad victory over the Vancouver Canucks at the Saddledome. The 31-year-old forward was in the lineup again for Tuesday's trip to Seattle for an exhibition affair against the Kraken.
“I don't think you can treat it any different,” Eakin said of the urgency that could come with a tryout opportunity. “For me, it's when you start thinking, when you start worrying, you start missing those little things during a game. You start thinking too much. So you want to come in, put your best foot forward, work as hard as you can, do the right things every shift or every time you get a chance and then see what happens. It starts with hard work and go from there.”
That is precisely why Eakin, a prairie boy from Winnipeg, figures he'll fit right in.
He's been an NHL mainstay for the past decade, cresting the 700-game mark toward the tail end of the 2021-22 campaign.
Along the way, he's contributed 110 goals and 146 assists.
Through the first few days of his audition, Eakin had been lined up primarily as a left winger, with fellow tryout Sonny Milano on the opposite flank and either Nazem Kadri or Connor Zary up the middle.
In Seattle, the versatile veteran was getting a glimpse at centre. He won 56.1 per cent of his faceoffs last season, finishing in the top 20 among the NHL'S regular faceoff men.