As for Stoll, who will be serving his one-game suspension, White flat out delcared, “He’s not a dirty player.”
“Obviously, 99 percent of the guys in the league don’t intentionally try to hurt anyone and I know he’s one of those guys,” he said. “Just kind of the wrong place at the wrong time for both of us.
“He got me square in the head with his forearm and I know he feels bad about it,” the defenseman said. “I don’t hold anything against him.” How does he know how Stoll feels? “He sent me a message,” White said, “and we had some correspondence over the phone.”
[…T]here are at least a couple people in the Sharks organization, it’s safe to say, who know enough about Jarret Stoll to know that what happened on the ice in that one moment isn’t a reflection of who he is as a person. At the NHL All-Star break, Stoll passed on the chance to for some time in Vegas or Cabo or Mammoth or wherever it is that players spend their four days if they aren’t in the event. Instead he flew back to his roots in Saskatoon, where a longtime friend was in the final days of his battle with cancer. That friend was Chad Martin, Todd McLellan’s brother-in-law who died March 12.
[…] Stoll also has been running a charity golf tournament for three years that has raised about $750,000 for Saskatoon’s Royal University Hospital.
[…] I also asked Stoll about that extra time he spent staring at White right after the hit. “I knew he hit his face on the dasher,” Stoll said. “I was trying to maybe hold him up or hope he was all right. It wasn’t my intent to lay him into the boards. I slowed up and tried to pin him. That was my intention.”
In addition to being an apparently stand-up guy, he also has shoulders like Sonny Corleone.