Early on Wednesday, Yahoo Sports' Puck Daddy blog highlighted a quote from former Chicago Blackhawks goalie and current New York Rangers netminder Antti Raanta, given to the Finnish paper Satakunnan Kansa, in which Raanta goes off on his former club and actually admits to rooting against the Blackhawks during the team's 2015 NHL Stanley Cup playoff run after Hawks head coach Joel Quenneville demoted Raanta to the AHL in favor of Scott Darling.
"I was really hoping Nashville would beat us in four games and I could get back to Finland. I was [so pissed off] about how Chicago was treating me," Raanta said, as translated by Yahoo. Raanta, who played in 25 games for Chicago in 2013-14 and 14 games in 2014-15, posting .897 and .936 saver percentages respectively, then went on to suggest that the Blackhawks were suffering from "weak spirit" and that Quenneville simply didn't like him.
"I noticed that coach didn't like me, in that position it is pretty difficult to fight the windmills," Raanta said.
Now, Raanta, speaking with Mark Lazerus of the Chicago Sun-Times, vehemently denies having said anything of the sort.
"I have never said anything like that," Raanta said recently, via Lazerus.
Raanta said that he actually wanted to continue playing for the Hawks AHL affiliate, the Rockford IceHogs, but was instead called up as an extra netminder for the playoffs. While the story in Satakunnan suggested that Raanta was upset with the move, Raanta says only that he was "frustrated," but that even that didn't last long. He indicated that it's not in his nature to be that vindictive.
"I'm not that kind of guy that I would say something like that, and hope my team to lose, even if I'm not paying goalie."
