Aaron Portzline on Bishop and Friends says after the 2019-20 season (believe he meant 2020-21), a meeting with veteran players took place (Atkinson, Jones, Werenski, Nyquist) where they "basically came back with 'you gotta get Laine and Merzlikins out of here.'"
https://x.com/CBJcenter/status/1825897025646240130
Starts around 3:16 left
https://post.futurimedia.com/wbns/playlist/listen-12140.html
This is very…concerning for me personally as the following happened to the above players:
Atkinson – Traded a day after doing a media scrum for a playmaker to support Laine
Jones – Requested trade
Werenski – Got paid but initially looking like he was going to move on
Nyquist – Traded
Laine – Traded after Jarmo left on a cap dump
Elvis – Still in the room
Wow no wonder the room was bad…the room leaders called out Jarmo and got removed for speaking out.
by Green9510
11 Comments
Pretty depressing how poorly run the team and lock room were by Jarmo after Torts left. Just fully ignoring all player comments it seems like and the team suffered exponentially.
Also this just makes Elvis and Laine seem worse and worse as teammates as all this news continues to come out. I pray Elvis is gone by the start of camp but I know it’s highly unlikely.
Still more evidence Jarmo needed to go.
I think Waddell would deal Elvis if he could – wonder what he said when Don asked if he wanted to be part of the solution?
I for one am shocked, SHOCKED to hear the players don’t like Elvis /s. Cannot wait to move on from this clown, going to be hard to be competitive and to develop a good culture as long as he’s there.
Didn’t Laine have issues in Winnipeg as well in the locker room?? So maybe it’s him that is the actual problem? Interesting if this is true though, the leaders stood up and they got moved out…
Yea jarmo long overstayed his welcome. Should have been fired sooner honestly
I can’t imagine that this locker room meeting was why all of these transactions happened:
* Atkinson was getting older and we traded 1:1 for Voracek who was on a better term contract. Only cost a 6th to offload him to Arizona and LTIRetire.
* Jones got traded for what appeared to be a great deal at the time, sure Boqvist and Bean didn’t work about but Sillinger and Jiricek are looking to be the real deal. Meanwhile, Jones has absolutely slumped and costs more than Laine, and has six more seasons on his contract. I call that a dodged bullet.
* The Nyquist situation sucks for us considering he’s tearing it up in Nashville but they’re a much better built team than we and Minnesota are.
This is another reason why hiring two straight first time coaches was a horrible decision. Inmates running the asylum.
What time was the interview?
Shit, I heard it happened earlier when that same core of leadership said that Bobrovski was the cancer in the room and should have been sent packing after the summer he spent in France with Panarin.
Some of these situations were just guys naturally moving on from a bad team, but the fact that Portzy has been sitting on “the locker room didn’t like Laine and Elvis” for years really shows Jarmo was completely out of his mind the last few seasons.
The timing of actual events doesn’t really jive with these comments, nor do the actual moves they made but Portzy was never shy about his comments about Laine so maybe? I guess we’ll never really know