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Evander Kane is in a Twitter beef with a former NHL tough guy

Preston Hodgkinson
Preston Hodgkinson
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Sep 1 2026, 4:27 pm
Evander Kane is in a Twitter beef with a former NHL tough guy
Bob Frid/Imagn Images

Evander Kane couldn’t help but stir up some more drama this summer.

The 35-year-old is without an NHL contract for this upcoming season, but that hasn’t stopped him from being very active on social media. He’s already stirred the pot with vaccine conspiracy theories and gotten into a tiff with Edmonton Oilers beat reporter Mark Spector.

Now, there is beef brewing with former NHL tough guy Kurtis Gabriel, who briefly played with Kane on the San Jose Sharks during the 2020-21 season. Gabriel ripped his former teammate over the weekend on an episode of the San Jose Hockey Now podcast, calling out Kane’s behaviour and reputation in the Sharks locker room.

It appears Kane caught wind of the clip, as he posted a cryptic social media response on Monday afternoon.

“I can’t wait for the day I decide to share ‘my truths.’ The only difference? Mine will come with facts, receipts, and the actual truth,” Kane wrote. “For now, I’ll simply say this: a lot of people have become far too comfortable speaking publicly while relying on my silence. Enjoy it while it lasts.

“There are plenty of [bombs] with plenty of names attached. When the time is right, everything will speak for itself.”Ā 

Kane never mentioned Gabriel by name, but the former NHL enforcer clearly took the post as a response to his comments on the podcast.

Not to be outdone, Gabriel quickly pieced together a reply to Kane, where he called him out once again for being a bad teammate. He started by saying that he reached out to Kane before the clip was posted and offered to chat privately or publicly about it.

“I literally sent Kaner a message the night before saying, ‘It’s coming.’ I’m open to speaking publicly, privately, whatever he wants,'” Gabriel said. “He read it, didn’t answer; it wasn’t surprising. Just like when I called him out in the locker room, he just stared at me.”

Gabriel then launched into another story about Kane during his brief time with the Sharks. He set the scene that the team was playing on the road against the Minnesota Wild and that he was a healthy scratch for the game, but Kane was getting teased by his teammates at the morning skate.

“We hear that some sh*t went down with Kaner during the morning skate,” Gabriel said. “I think [Tomas] Hertl and [Erik] Karlsson were chirping him or something, and he didn’t like it. He was just getting ripped all the time by everybody about the gambling, about everything.

“Then we hear that, because he didn’t like them chirping him, he left the rink from morning skate, went to the locker room, and he took all their sticks and started buzzsawing them with the circular saw where we cut sticks… the trainers ran over to stop him.”

Gabriel alleges that he heard that Kane stayed at the rink all day and ordered a Domino’s pizza to eat by himself. Despite all the drama from that morning, Kane was chosen to start the game against the Wild that night.

Being a healthy scratch in the press box that evening, Gabriel says that he saw Kane protest the first shift of the game.

“They drop the puck in Minnesota, he barely skates for like 20 seconds and then just goes to the bench,” Gabriel said. “He like boycotted playing the shift, and then after five minutes he started playing hard after that. Like come on, man.”

It doesn’t appear that Gabriel is all too worried about Kane’s threat to reveal some unflattering info in retaliation. In the video, the 33-year-old says that he knows what Kane is referring to and was actually encouraging Kane to tell the story.

Whether or not Kane decides to fire back another response remains to be seen, but the drama has been intensifying for the veteran power forward.

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