A midweek smorgas-bored…and it’s hard to tell the BS from the mule muffins…
Hey, did you notice that Jacob Trouba was wearing a Detroit Tigers cap during his blah, blah, blah session with news snoops on Monday?
You know what that means, don’t you?
That’s right, the young Jets defender definitely wants out of Dodge. Wants to join the Red Wings back home in Motown. Otherwise he’d have been wearing a Winnipeg Goldeyes lid.
But wait.
Didn’t Kyle Connor also have a Tigers cap on? Damn straight, he did. And isn’t he a Detroit kid? Damn straight, he is. Must mean he wants to follow Trouba and join the Winged Wheel.
Sounds silly, right? I mean, who’s going to draw conclusions based on what a guy plunks on his melon? But that, ladies and gentlemen/boys and girls, is how rumor, innuendo and speculation are born and grow legs.
Now, in Trouba’s case, we know he’s expressed a desire to part company with the Winnipeg Jets, and nothing he muttered during his garbage bag day chin-wag suggested he’s developed warm-and-fuzzies for Pegtown since delivering a trade request three years ago. More to the point, he likely firmed up the belief that his shelf life in River City is now shorter than a two-year-old kid’s attention span.
“Same answer as always,” Trouba said when asked, point blank, if he had any desire to re-sign with les Jets long term. “We’ll figure it out once things get going in the summer, what’s best, move forward from there. We’ve gotta sit down, have a meeting, figure out what to do, move forward. I haven’t really thought about it.”
For now, then, whether Trouba returns for another whirl with les Jets or general manager Kevin Cheveldayoff finds him a home with another National Hockey League outfit is pure conjecture.
Just like this whole house-divided business.
Serious infighting, of course, is the narrative the Drab Slab began to push on April 5 with this headline: “Something is rotten in Jetsville.” In the accompanying article, by Mike McIntyre, we were informed that the local shinny side was “rotten to the core.” He cited “multiple sources,” who could have been his barber, his dentist, his neighbor’s day-care worker, or someone who saw Trouba wearing a Detroit Tigers ball cap. But he failed to tell us what those “multiple sources” told him.
Oddly enough, a week later McIntyre was advising us that les Jets had better harmony than the Everly Brothers (Google them, kids; they were very good).
And now, after les Jets have had their Day of Yadda, Yadda, Yadda with news snoops, the Freep is back to the house-divided narrative, with a creepy pic of an evil-looking captain Blake Wheeler and this hedder and drophead (on Page One, no less): “Cracks in the ice…Jets pack up early amid whispers of fractured locker room.” McIntyre goes to great lengths to support his notion that a nasty family feud was behind les Jets’ premature ouster from the Stanley Cup tournament, Saturday vs. the Blues in St. Loo.
His evidence…
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Exhibit A: “We’ve got a few ruffled feathers in there that we’re gonna have to flatten out,” said head coach Paul Maurice. Really? There were bruised egos in the changing room? How shocking. Like, that’s never happened before with any other team.
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Exhibit B: According to GM Chevy, his exit interviews with the workers were “not similar at all” to last year’s. They were “pretty frank, pretty blunt” with “lots of different questions.” Well, duh. Last year, les Jets reached the Western Conference final. This time they were one and done. That demands a different tone to the dialogue.
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Exhibit C: Chevy hinted at changes in the leadership group. Sorry, nothing to see there. It’s happened before (see Thornton, Joe; Luongo, Roberto) and six NHL outfits function without anyone wearing the ‘C’ on his jersey. Leaders are going to lead, with or without a letter, and followers will follow.
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Exhibit D: The players held a late-season, closed-door meeting after a loss, denying news snoops prompt access to the changing room. Oh…my…gawd! Stop the presses! Dog bites man! Seriously. The airing of grievances behind closed doors is as commonplace in sports as spitting.
Here’s Wheeler on that matter: “We have closed-door meetings all the time. It just may not be necessarily after a game when guys are waiting outside the door. You know what I mean? So, um, communication’s a huge thing, um, you know, air everything out, especially when the team’s struggling and you’re not winning. These are all real positive things every team does, not just us, and, um, I think that particular situation was more noticeable because, like I said, you know, we made you guys wait.”
And here’s Maurice: “We might have had twice as many closed-door meetings last year. We just didn’t schedule ’em right after a game after a loss you didn’t like. And, boy, you’re a lot more worried when you’re coaching a team and they aren’t having any. Like, you gotta have two or three a year. You need a couple of dustups. This is a competitive, snarlin’ sport when it’s played right, and you need a bit of that.”
I covered sports for 30 years, and experience tells me Wheeler and Maurice aren’t BSing us.
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Exhibit E: Maurice isn’t warm and fuzzy with all the players. You think the Montreal Canadiens of the 1970s linked arms and sang Kumbaya around the campfire with Scotty Bowman? They felt warm and fuzzy about him when they collected their Stanley Cup rings and received their winning playoff shares. The rest of the time, not so much.
Bottom line: McIntyre is reading between the lines and has yet to provide concrete evidence that les Jets were undone by family squabbling. Until he delivers, I’m not convinced it was anything more than the basic bickering you find anytime you put two dozen alpha males in the same room.
Just wondering: If McIntyre and the Drab Slab are right about a deep divide with les Jets, why isn’t Ken Wiebe and the Winnipeg Sun also beating that drum? I mean, Wiebe has been with Winnipeg HC almost every step of the way, so it follows that he, too, would have sniffed out any serious disconnect among the players. Is Wiebe a lousy news snoop who knows about the chasm but chooses not to write it, or is it a faux narrative? Personally, I think Wiebe has grown into a fine reporter. I don’t believe he would sit on a story that significant, which tells me it isn’t a significant story. Except in the Drab Slab.
It’s easy to take a quote and torque it to your liking. News snoops do it all the time. Wheeler, for example, said this when asked about Chevy’s difficult task of keeping this current Jets roster intact: “We’d like to keep every guy.” Sure sounds like he’s happy with his teammates. Every one of them. See how that works?
So tell us, Jacob Trouba, any interest in helping good, ol’ Chevy sign all those restricted and unrestricted free agents? You know, maybe take a discount so Chevy can keep the gang together for another run at the Stanley Cup next spring? “That’s his job,” Trouba harrumphed. Translation: I want mine.
Yo! All those among the rabble who’d like to see blueline guru Charlie Huddy punted! This from Coach Potty Mouth Maurice: “Here’s what I’m gonna do for you. If all the coaches that lose, that have this meeting after the first round get fired, I’ll resign…take my staff with me. So that’s how I feel about it.”
And, finally, Maurice delivered my favorite line of the day, near the conclusion of his yadda, yadda, yadda: “Everything I’ve said today is bull shit ’cause we didn’t win.” Yup.
The River City Renegade 
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