From Dan Steinberg at DC Sports Blog:
“It was actually a shock to me,” he told Toronto’s 590 The Fan on Tuesday. “I didn’t really know I was really being shopped around or anything like that. I just got a call from the Caps GM George McPhee, one day, and he told me I had been dealt, and he told me I’d been dealt to Winnipeg.
“Obviously I was sad when I heard I was being traded — I have a lot of friends in Washington and I’ve been there a lot of years and I really enjoyed my time there. But when he said Winnipeg ,that made it feel better pretty quick. This was just something that I think they ran out of room under the salary cap in Washington, and then some players were gonna get squeezed out and I was one of them. It’s not like I was specifically saying I wanted to come to Winnipeg or whether I wanted to be moved at all. It was just something that they felt needed to be done, and it ended up working out for me.”
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