When the on-ice product isn’t very entertaining, fans can always turn to locker room gossip to fill the void in their hockey lives, and after the Washington game, Sabres fans got their own TMZ moment when Ryan Miller called out Patrick Kaleta for whining to the media.
Yesterday, Ryan Miller gave a one-on-one interview with Sabres host Brian Duff, and said that things have been squared away with Kaleta, thus ending any drama behind the scenes. Said Miller:
I’ve talked to Patty, I’ve apologized to Patty. I felt like what I was told he said and what he actually said were two different things. I’m not gonna get too far into it, but the meeting was different enough for me to react the way I did, and what he actually said sounded more like player who just wants to come back and play as soon as possible, and he’s frustrated he can’t be, which is completely what you’d expect. I’m gonna try and move on from that, and either way I probably shouldn’t have handled it like that, but again, I was frustrated, and I think everyone in Buffalo knows I’m prone to say stupid things that come up over the course of the season, so I just wanted to make sure that I handled it with Patty. It wasn’t the right thing to say no matter what.
With the obvious frustration building in the locker room, it’s nice to see Miller come out and address an awkward situation head on as opposed to letting it fester. Both players are men who play with passion, so this could have been a situation that led to a locker room meltdown if they let it get out of hand.
One other quote caught my attention – “You can get me to say just about anything after a loss like that”, said Miller at the beginning of his interview. Anything, you say? We may have to explore this later.