NHL veteran says he will make a comeback next season.

For those of you who have been awaiting an update on this situation this will certainly come as good news. 

As most of our readers will already know there was a highly publicized incident this season between the Buffalo Sabres and veteran forward Patrick Berglund. Although the story did not get the kind of national attention I would have expected it to pick up at the time, hardcore hockey fans were very much aware of the fact that there was something up in Buffalo. We never really learned what the catalyst for the whole situation was but we would eventually learn that Berglund had made the difficult decision to walk away from the Buffalo Sabres organization while still very much under contract with them.

The move came as a major surprise to everyone that was not within the Sabres organization as it is an extremely uncommon situation to see in the National Hockey League, or in any other major professional sport for that matter. Not only due to the poor optics that a situation like this puts the player under but also due to the fact that there is an outstanding sum of money involved in such a move, as was the case with Berglund in this scenario with the Sabres.

When Berglund walked away from his contract with the Buffalo Sabres he walked away from a salary of $3.85 million for the season, the kind of money that most people would never dream of walking away from. What makes this crazier is that Berglund was under contract through to 2022 which means that he left several more years of that annual $3.85 million in salary on the table, a total of well over $10 million dollars over the remaining term of his contract. 

That of course speaks to the poor state of mind he was in at the time, but in his first interview since leaving the Sabres Berglund opened up about his decision and expressed no regrets. The former St. Louis Blues veteran spoke to Blues insider Andy Strickland and revealed that he has no regrets about leaving millions of dollars on the table, prioritizing his mental health over his potential earnings. Additionally according to Strickland it appears that Berglund fully expects to return for the 2019 - 2020 NHL regular season, which means he may recoup a lot of the money he would have last over the next several years.