from Dave Stubbs of Hockey Inside/Out,

From his upstate New York home, where he and his family will spend U.S. Thanksgiving, Cole was fairly bursting to offer his view on the point of view of Hamrlik, who might be hearing a loud ticking of the final year of his Capitals contract.

“I am bent on this one, yeah,” Cole, 34, said Wednesday evening, so angry that for the first minute or two of our conversation he spoke in phrases and half-sentences, stopping to reconstruct his thoughts.

“This (Hamrlik) is one guy out of 700-plus guys (in the NHLPA), this is the one guy who’s actually tried to have conversations with some of the guys we’ve skated with (during the lockout) and they’ve all just been, ‘Hammer, seriously, wake up.’

“For him to come out and say this, it’s the most selfish thing I’ve heard during the lockout. Without a doubt. It’s just disappointing. You’d think the veteran guys are the guys who’d take more pride in what other veteran guys sacrificed in the last lockout, how we all benefited from that as a group. Some guys never played again.

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