When the NHL brought on You Can Play as an official partner in the spring of 2013, the hope was that the league's first openly gay player wasn't far behind.
Two and a half years later, we are still waiting.
"It's surprising," Patrick Burke, the co-founder of You Can Play, said Tuesday. "We felt that the work the league was doing, the culture that the league had, the way our guys responded not just to our initiative, but to the LGBT community in general, I think we thought for sure by now there would be an out player in the NHL.