Leafs' Sandin went mushroom-hunting to distract himself from contract talk

Rasmus Sandin is many things: a talented young defenceman on the Toronto Maple Leafs, a recent signee of a new contract extension, and uh, a fan of mushrooms?

Sandin met the media today at practice, and spoke about how he kept his mind open and free during the offseason prior to signing his two-year, $2.8 million contract extension last week.

As we’ve written about previously, the negotiation was likely a bit of testy one, with the deal not being signed until the preseason had already started.

“Negotiations are going nowhere,” Lewis Gross, Sandin’s agent, told Sportsnet’s Luke Fox earlier this summer.

But while his agent might’ve been publicly concerned about his client, Sandin himself was as happy as, well, a character in a fairy tale?

And it turns out that he turned to going foraging in the woods for chanterelle mushrooms to distract himself from the discourse, per The Athletic’s Jonas Siegel.

Rasmus Sandin says he went foraging in the woods for chanterelle mushrooms to get his mind off contract negotiations.

— Jonas Siegel (@jonassiegel) October 2, 2022

If you, like me, weren’t 100% sure what chanterelle mushrooms are, well, they’re just… mushrooms. Not the psychedelic kind, though.

“They are among the most popular of wild edible mushrooms. They are orange, yellow or white, meaty and funnel-shaped,” per their Wikipedia page that I definitely wasn’t expecting to be reading when I woke up this morning.

It’s expected to be a big year for Sandin, who had 16 points in 51 regular-season games last season for the Leafs by way of five goals and 11 assists.

Maybe we’ll have to start calling his assists “mushrooms” instead of “apples,” though.

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