After a competitive training camp, veterans Danton Heinen and Ryan Graves were told they would be going on waivers.
“Obviously, the news you don’t want to hear,” Heinen said. “You wanted to make this team. But there’s not much you can do. You’ve got to go down, work hard and work towards getting back here.”
Both players cleared waivers and went to Wilkes-Barre/Scranton, with Penguins Head Coach Dan Muse saying the reports were “outstanding.”
“Obviously, you want to play in the NHL. It’s the best league in the world. It’s hard to be here. I have an appreciation for that. You go there [to the AHL], you want to go with a good mindset and you want to be back here,” Graves said.
Heinen and Graves were recalled to Pittsburgh on Tuesday and rejoined the team for practice on Wednesday ahead of three games in four days and some player personnel changes.
Justin Brazeau, who’s had a hot start to his first season with Pittsburgh, will miss a minimum of four weeks with an upper-body injury; Noel Acciari will miss a minimum of three weeks with an upper-body injury; Owen Pickering was re-assigned to WBS; and Filip Hallander also appeared to leave practice early, but Muse had no update.
He was extremely complimentary of how Heinen and Graves handled their situation, and it’s resulted in opportunities for them.
“These are guys that have been in the league for a long time, and those were the decisions that we made. I think there’s two roads that they could have gone down in terms of how they wanted to handle it,” Muse continued. “Both guys chose the correct path, and the right path for them.
“The reports were great in terms of, number one, the approach they took when they went down there, and then the work that they put in. Then they followed it up with their play. And so, all those things were at a very, very high level.”
As Graves said, at the end of the day, it’s about the person that you are, too.
“You’re not going to go there and sulk and complain,” he said. “You’re still playing hockey for a living. That’s pretty cool. There’s been some aspects of it that have been really hard. But I’ve been on the side of it where you’re a 20-year-old kid and coming into the American League, and there’s some guys that I’ve played with that came down and you could see both sides of how guys take it. You can either go there and ride into the sunset and just take it with a bad attitude and be miserable, or you can go there and you can try to play and work on your game and get better. It’s a good league.”
