Paul Martin left the Pittsburgh Penguins for the San Jose Sharks early in free agency last year. Very few people expected that he would be squaring off against his former team in the Stanley Cup Final just the next season. Unlikely as it was back then, that’s exactly the situation we’ve got here.
Martin was never going to stay in Pittsburgh, and he had known it for a long time leading up to the end of the season. I mean, realistically, we all knew it. He was getting up there in years and wasn’t really working with the kind of game the Penguins wanted to play.