ST. LOUIS \u2014 The night before he made his NHL debut, Matthew Schaefer followed Ryan Pulock back to his hotel room after dinner. <\/p>\n
They were talking about nothing and everything, the 31-year-old Pulock asking the 18-year-old Schaefer how excited he was to play his first game the next night.<\/p>\n
Schaefer, who is thinking about getting a tattoo, then asked Pulock about his tattoo: a Maple Leaf over his heart with two hockey sticks. He has it in memory of his brother, Brock, who died at 13 years old after injuries sustained in a car crash. Ryan was in the backseat.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s told the story publicly before, but not often. Schaefer didn\u2019t know it. Ryan, well aware of Schaefer\u2019s own experience with losing his mother, recounted it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ST. LOUIS \u2014 The night before he made his NHL debut, Matthew Schaefer followed Ryan Pulock back to…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":647303,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[42],"tags":[12960,1301,293,203738,62,2225,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-647302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-matthew-schaefer","tag-new-york-islanders","tag-nhl","tag-ryan-pulock","tag-sports","tag-sports-plus","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116208985112079816","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/647302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=647302"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/647302\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/647303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=647302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=647302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=647302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}