Greg Wyshynski’s “Dear Satan” tweet gets answered…by Miroslav Šatan

Slovakian hockey star Miroslav Šatan heard plenty of jokes about his last name (pronounced shuh-TAN, for the record) during the 1,050 games he played in the NHL with the Edmonton Oilers, Buffalo Sabres, New York Islanders, Pittsburgh Penguins and Boston Bruins. ESPN, Sports Illustrated, Yahoo and Fox Sports all used “666” in the URL of his player page, there were regular April Fool’s jokes about him being traded to the New Jersey Devils (which would have produced one of the best jerseys in history), and even his retirement in 2014 saw a “Satan be gone” headline from Greg Wyshynski, then at Yahoo. Wyshynski’s at ESPN now, and still injects plenty of humor into his hockey coverage, but one of his recent tweets led to an even funnier response from Šatan himself on Wednesday.

Dear Satan,

I don't ask for much, but can you please compel John Tavares to sign a cap friendly seven-year contract with the Toronto Maple Leafs and have him declare it's because "I believe in what Kyle is building here?"

Yours in hellfire chaos,
Greg

— Greg Wyshynski (@wyshynski) May 22, 2018

https://twitter.com/miro81s/status/999406178651332609

That’s hilarious, and very well played by Šatan. That’s one of the best hockey tweets in history. And it’s nice that it’s now Šatan leaning into jokes that weren’t even about him in the first place. He’s had a solid post-playing career, serving as the Team Europe GM in the 2016 World Cup of Hockey (they finished second to Canada) and more recently serving as the GM of Slovakia’s national team. But this was a particularly great response from him, and one that made a whole lot of hockey fans laugh.

[Miroslav Šatan on Twitter; photo from Naomi on Flickr]