Gaudette responds to accusation he caused the COVID outbreak in Canucks' locker room.

There was perhaps no team more heavily impacted this season by the ongoing pandemic than the Vancouver Canucks. The entire team was forced to miss significant time in the middle of the season after an outbreak of COVID ravaged the locker room, in some cases leaving players with relatively serious systems, and as we have learned more and more about what happened a great deal of the blame has been placed at the feet of Adam Gaudette and his wife.

Gaudette has been labeled "patient zero" by some members of the media and there is good reason now to believe that he was indeed the catalyst for bringing the deadly virus into the Canucks locker room and eventually infecting a significant portion of his former teammates and members of their support staff. Gaudette himself however has not taken too kindly to being labeled in this fashion and the 24 year old centerman, who now plays for the Chicago Blackhawks, has now spoken out about just that. 

"Don’t believe everything you read on Twitter," said Gaudette as per Blackhawks insider Mark Lazerus. "There’s a lot of bullshit going around. A lot of disrespectful things said about me and my wife that are just not true."

Gaudette would go on to add that he has a good relationship with his former teammates, although admittedly that flies in the face of what was reported by National Hockey League insider Elliotte Friedman earlier in the week. Friedman, a very credible reporter and arguably among the very best in the business of hockey, recently shared information regarding how members of the Canucks locker room felt about the whole situation and indicated that members of that locker room were not at all happy with Gaudette.

"I don't know if him or anyone in his family were at fault," said Friedman on The People's Show. "What I do know is that it was him first and then it kind of got around."

"I've had people tell me that the media overblew the situation. I've had other people tell me that's not true and that some of the symptoms to some of the players were very serious and they were upset."

"Do I think that all the Canucks are furious at Gaudette? No I don't believe that. Do I think it is possible that some of the Canucks are upset about how all this happened? Yes I do believe that."

As is often the case during a messy breakup there is a lot of he said she said going around. I suspect that the truth here can probably be found somewhere in the middle.