Thomas Drance

I'm serious.

Right there.

They're probably not all about winning.

Yeah.

In a way that would be very unusual for a guy who's as competitive in terms of how he carries himself on the ice as Philip Ronick.

Well, and then there's degrees of this, too, right?

Like, for example, one guy...

who has a no-trade clause that I would totally view a little bit differently.

And even then, I'd expect it to be at least somewhat malleable.

But a guy like Kevin Lankanen, who we know missed games shortly after the birth of his child, he's been very private about what it was.

But the point being that clearly there's reasons to expect...

just in the public record, why he might prefer to keep his family settled for as long as possible while he has control over the situation.

It's like, okay, that might be a little bit different, right?

Other guys who want to stay, like Jake DeBrus probably is going to want to stay West.

Does that mean he won't expand his list if that's his best option?

Not necessarily, but I think we can at least operate with a baseline expectation that a guy who really only was talking to Seattle and Vancouver when he was an unrestricted free agent just two summers ago still would prefer to be West.

We should at least operate with that as sort of a parameter.

But the idea that it's just no, I don't think makes sense.

And finally, this all comes back to the vortex of ineptitude.

Exactly.