Ex-Maple Leaf Connor Brown admits to tears when he was traded

The Toronto Maple Leafs made the call to trade forward Connor Brown to the provincial rival Ottawa Senators on July 1, 2019. And the unfortunate part of the nature of professional sports is that athletes can often be unprepared for the life changing news of being sent to a new city and team.

For Brown, he happened to be attending the wedding of former teammate Matt Martin along with several of his then-current Leafs teammates. 

“I was in the Hamptons at Matt Martin’s wedding,” Brown told Luke Gazdic on the Maple Leads podcast. “It’s 11 o’clock at night. And you can imagine I got a couple cocktails into me… I’m revved up. Next thing you know, [Mitch Marner] comes up to me, and he’s like, ‘You check your phone?'”

“Who’s texting me at 11 on a Saturday? I’m in the Hamptons,” Brown added.

“Jeff Jackson, my agent. He said, ‘Call me.’ So I’m walking on, like, the 18th fairway at Sebonack [golf course] on the phone. And Jeff’s like, ‘yeah, Brownie. You got traded. It’s gonna come out tomorrow.’ I’m like, ‘You couldn’t wait until tomorrow morning?'”

It turned out that Brown was traded to the Ottawa Senators along with Nikita Zaitsev and Michael Carcone in exchange for Cody Ceci, Ben Harpur, Aaron Luchuk and a third-round pick in the 2020 NHL Entry Draft. The move came on the heels of Brown setting to enter the third and final year of the contract that he inked with the Leafs in 2017. 

And as a Toronto native who loved playing for his hometown team, the news of the trade hit Brown hard.

“I’m around all my buddies… most of the guys in Leafs are there at the wedding,” he said. “It’s emotional. And I’m an emotional guy. I’m a crier, and like, next thing, and I’m crying. It was an emotional [time].”

Brown was only able to appear in four games this past season for the Washington Capitals after being traded once again thanks to suffering an ACL tear. 

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