The trouble with Trouba trade talk

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/06/2016 (3375 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

BUFFALO, N.Y. – NHL teams not on their toes this week are at serious risk of some blunder that could be a grave setback.

Wednesday’s expansion announcement and the accompanying rules that will stock the new Las Vegas team next June precedes Friday’s and Saturday’s annual entry draft at the First Niagara Center.

Tuesday, teams learned next season’s salary cap maximum is US$73 million.

On Saturday, the official courting period with pending unrestricted free agents begins. Qualifying offers are due Monday for restricted free agents and the free-agent market opens July 1.

And every team is dealing with its own pending unrestricted and restricted free agents who need new contracts.

Even when the season is in full swing, rarely is there a busier time in the NHL.

The Winnipeg Jets come to the entry draft as part of the overall league story that has so much happening on so many fronts.

They’re in the midst of a feel-good buzz at the moment because of their draft-lottery win, moving from the sixth pick Friday to the second, which is expected to land them top Finnish scorer Patrick Laine.

Jets GM Kevin Cheveldayoff is also dealing with restricted free agents Mark Scheifele, Jacob Trouba, Adam Lowry and Joel Armia, as well as other prospects.

He is also, not surprisingly, caught up in the league’s biannual trade-rumour vortex, as he finds Trouba’s name being slung fast and loose on many fronts.

That’s a product of draft week being just as ripe a time for deals as the few weeks preceding the annual trade deadline.

The Trouba speculation has proliferated since the conclusion of the regular season.

Are the Jets in a dealing mode? Is the rumour mill merely feeding itself?

It certainly is hard to tell but more than one rival NHL team is having a hard time figuring out why it’s being discussed at all.

As one hockey-department executive explained in recent days, rival executives can’t grasp why the Jets would want to trade Trouba, because if they do, their urgent need would be to at least get a good defenceman back and there are not many of those available.

Which makes the whole thing a waste of time.

That’s one of the most sensible approaches to the story, but it’s certainly not stemming the tide of rumours. And you can’t deny that where there’s smoke, there’s sometimes fire.

So let’s have a look at the factors that would or wouldn’t encourage a trade in this case:

Discouraging a trade

❚ Straight on, it’s a warped logic that the Jets are simply trying to move out their 22-year-old defenceman, the ninth overall pick of the 2012 draft, who already has three years of NHL experience.

All kinds of labels have been thrown at Trouba in recent weeks, from disappointing to underachiever to declining in value. We’ve heard from various cities that this GM or that GM wouldn’t consider trading his “Young Player X” for Trouba, all of which must play to uproarious laughter in Winnipeg because it seems no one has considered that the Jets wouldn’t entertain any of those options either because, hold on here … it would be a terrible deal for the Jets.

❚ Cheveldayoff said a week ago he’s not trying to trade Trouba. Some in Jets Nation have tried to suggest he’s lying or he doesn’t mean it or he’s leaving open the possibility. Those folks will believe what they want to believe. Of course Cheveldayoff takes his colleagues’ phone calls. If the matter comes up during conversation, the Jets’ GM would be irresponsible if he weren’t a good listener but it’s quite a leap from there to saying Jacob Trouba is available, or “trade bait,” as we continue to hear.

❚ That Trouba himself may want to sign in Winnipeg and, well, these deals sometimes take time.

Encouraging a trade:

❚ Trouba has said, though somewhat vaguely, he’d like to sign to stay with the Jets. But if in his heart he’d rather leave, there is nothing on the face of the Earth that will force him to sign a contract or an offer sheet with any team.

❚ The idea the expansion draft puts the Jets in a precarious situation with Trouba. (That’s folly to most experts. If you have four good defencemen, Trouba, Byfuglien, Enstrom, Myers, you protect them next June; case closed. You go eight skaters and one goalie for the protection list and you work it out from there.)

❚ There is some off-ice conflict or unusual extenuating circumstance that has not come to light. There’s nothing obvious there, but we can’t say that’s not in play, and there are sometimes private and personal nuances to business.

❚ A staggeringly good offer. You can’t say those never happen, but they are so rare you’d be considered a pipe-dreamer to think there was any probability. And this is where so many reporters and bloggers and columnists fall into this story, that their imaginations have run so wild (are they bored?) that there are any number of iterations and interested teams allegedly out there for such a deal.

So it would seem that the only real factor that suggests a trade is possible is Trouba himself, that he has not yet come to an agreement with the Jets.

On this most important of matters, we’ll have a definitive answer sometime between now and September.

tim.campbell@freepress.mb.ca