Whole story is super weird to me...I have to imagine something was lost in translation either to Kaut, to the media, or both. I don't know why he would make it up because what does he stand to gain from this story? The stuff he said about the national team and him apparently talking poorly about the Avs after he left certainly doesn't help his argument that it's true...especially with the added nugget of blaming his refusal to fight as to the reason he never made it to the NHL: "that's why you aren't in the NHL". I don't know that he made it up, but something just feels "off" about the whole thing from Kaut.
I also don't see why the Sharks would flat out lie with the strongly worded statement they put out in response. Yes, the league is trying to get away from fighting and putting a bigger focus on player safety (concussions) but the fallout from lying about it, assuming more players confirmed the story, would be far worse than the media attention that came from the original story...especially at this point of the offseason when there is nothing interesting going on.
If you google it, there are hardly any websites that reported on it and of the ones that did, none of them are very big. Outside of the 2-3 days the story was developing, the only place I've seen anything about it has been here or Sharks specific twitter accounts. We had some pretty big drama with Kane for a while there and the team was always pretty neutral in their response to it all saying they wanted to investigate, or wait for the league to investigate, etc.
Only other example I can think of was the Wilson/Thornton drama but even that wasn't a huge deal in the end and Wilson is gone.
I'll give Grier/the team the benefit of the doubt until I'm proven otherwise.
Edit: This is vastly different than the Blackhawks situation so not sure why that was even brought up or is even being discussed here.