“You’re going there to represent your country as best as you can.”Īs Kelly tried to come to terms with anything and everything about the Olympic experience, he pored over the names of his Canadian teammates. Ottawa-area natives Eric O’Dell and Derek Roy are also on the squad, as is former Rob Klinkhammer, who had two assists in 15 games with the Senators in 2011-12. “When you do something of this magnitude, the goal is to win,” he said. Kelly says he hasn’t seen enough of other national teams - he played against the Swiss national team during the Spengler Cup - to give a realistic pre-Olympic prediction about the Canadian team’s chances. Melanie Duchene/Keystone Photo by Melanie Duchene / AP Article content Chris Kelly, front, battles for the puck in Canada’s Spengler Cup game against the Mountfield club squad in Davos on Dec. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. The Spengler Cup came out of that and only then did I start thinking about the Olympic team.”
“It got to the point where I wasn’t getting any feelers from the NHL, so I decided to play in Belleville to see what would come out of it. “It wasn’t a plan or a goal I had in mind when the season started,” said Kelly, who will play with Belleville until the Canadian training camp opens.
It was only after he was invited to join Canada’s Spengler Cup squad over the Christmas break that he contemplated Olympic possbilities. He returned home to Ottawa to contemplate the next move and opted to join the Senators’ American Hockey League affiliate in Belleville.
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Kelly wasn’t re-signed by the Senators after his contract expired July 1, but he trained as if he had a contract, believing he had some game left. He went to Edmonton on a professional tryout offer from the Oilers, but wasn’t signed after training camp. The road to Pyeongchang took some strange turns.