Page 38 of Caught Offside

His phone rang. He picked up on the second ring.

“How are you feeling?” Marc said.

“Fine.”

“You lost a playoff series last night.”

“I’m aware.”

Marc paused. The pause carried a different weight than the pleasantries. “I need to talk to you about the protection list.”

Patrick set his coffee on the counter. The mug made no sound, centered on the tile.

“The Syndicate’s front office reached out yesterday,” Marc continued. “Before the game. I held it until this morning.”

“What changed?”

He heard it in Marc’s tone. The careful pacing, the fact that he’d opened with how are you feeling instead of leading with the information.

“Cap picture,” Marc said. “Tighter than they projected. Kovacs’s extension kicked in. The new goaltending contract eats more room than the old one. They can’t protect the whole roster, and on the blue line it comes down to one spot too few. Somebody’s left out.”

“And I’m the somebody.”

“You’re in the conversation. That’s different.”

“Is it?”

“Yes. They’ve got three weeks to submit the list. You’re one of four defensemen they’re evaluating.”

“Who are the other three?”

“I can’t⁠—”

“Marc.”

Marc exhaled. “Pruitt’s protected. His contract and his role make him untouchable. The kid from the third pairing is an RFA. They can let him go and re-sign him after the draft if the Zia Suns don’t bite. That leaves you and Harmon.”

Brett Harmon. Twenty-four, left-handed, a second-round pick. Younger, cheaper, with a higher ceiling. Patrick kept this to himself. The numbers were the numbers.

“Your play this year was excellent,” Marc said. “Twenty-two minutes a night. Top pair in the playoffs. The coaching staff trusts you with the most important minutes of the game.”

“That has value to a team that already has me. To a team making a protection list, it has a number. What’s my cap hit versus Harmon’s?”

Silence. Then Marc said it. “Harmon’s at one-point-two. You’re at three-point-eight.”

“So they can protect Harmon and use the remaining cap space to protect another forward.”

“That’s one scenario.”

“That’s the scenario, Marc.”

Another pause. “The Syndicate values you. That’s not a line. The GM doesn’t want to lose you. But protection lists are about math, and the math doesn’t care about what anyone wants. You need to be prepared for the possibility that they leave you exposed and hope the Zia Suns take someone else.”

“And if they don’t take someone else?”

“Then we have a conversation about Santa Fe.”

The sentence sat on the counter beside the cold coffee. Two thousand miles from Chicago. A team that wouldn’t play its first game until the fall, a roster the draft would cobble together out of everyone else’s castoffs, a desert city with no hockey history and no obvious reason to have a team at all.