Last Wednesday morning, Alex Nylander was in Chicago getting ready to practice with the Blackhawks.
Nylander had spent the rest of the season to that point in the AHL with the Rockford IceHogs, working toward his first NHL game since the 2019-20 season.
About 30 minutes before the start of practice, Nylander said that he was called into management's office, where he was told he had been traded to the Penguins.
"It was it was a bit of a surprise how it happened," Nylander told me in a phone interview on Monday. "I didn't know if it was coming.