Post Gazette and TribLive stories on Kris!
Letang’s trip to Russia long, strange and quite a journey
Kris Letang clearly does not think of it as a wasted trip.
Not when he was able to get in a few quality workouts.
Not when he had a driver responsible for taking him anywhere he wanted to go in the city, whenever he wanted to go there.
And, heck, not when he got his picture taken in a flashy SKA St. Petersburg uniform.
It was nearly enough to make him overlook the reality that he never got a chance to play in a hockey game, which is what had led him to Russia in the first place.
Letang barely had arrived in St. Petersburg, where he would end up spending “four or five days,” a little over a week ago before the NHL and the NHL Players’ Association agreed on the structure of a collective bargaining agreement to replace the one that had expired Sept. 15.
Letang returns after brief Russia trip
Say this for Penguins defenseman Kris Letang: He might not have supreme travel sense, but he isn‘t lazy.
At the end of a whirlwind week that saw Letang spend four nights in Russia, the all-star defenseman arrived in Pittsburgh at 4 a.m. Friday and was attended a workout at Southpointe seven hours later.
“It‘s good to be back,” he said.
He went to St. Petersburg, Russia, after signing a deal with the KHL team there. Of course, he never played a game because an NHL labor agreement was struck 48 hours later.
“The (KHL) deal was done a long time ago. It was just a question of timing,” Letang said. “Even if the lockout was closer to an end, they asked me to come anyways and to check out the facility and the way they were managing the team. It was a good experience.”