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ec06aaj · 07-26-2024, 04:13 PM

Spoiler:

Please note that all of the beyond is kayfabe and in-character. None of the events in it happened in the way they're portrayed here. Fire on the Ice is the autobiography of Simo Jaaskelainen, written years after his SHL career has concluded, and everything below should be taken as such.

Quote:Chapter 13: Regicide and Frostbite

I’ve heard that one of the most common questions athletes in hockey get asked by fans is “What’s it like when you get traded?” It makes a lot of sense: there isn’t another profession where you could wake up in the job you’ve done for the last seven years and at half past eleven, between your first and second smoke breaks, find that you’re now going to be working for a rival company eleven hundred miles away. And they expect you to show up the following morning, ready to go. It’s an experience that only us as professional athletes are ever really going to have.

The answer I’ve given before is “It depends”. Feel free to boo that, but it’s the only answer I can give to such an open-ended question. It depends on so many factors - what your relationship was like with your current team, what it’s like with your new team and their players, how public (or secretive) the decision was, how smart the new team’s back office is - and even if you ask it of somebody who’s willing to give you a complete answer, they still have to think of the politics of their honesty. Player X might hate his new coach’s guts but like hell is he going to say that.

Season 77 marked the second time I was traded. I had two very different experiences and now I’m safely retired, no skin left in the game, I can give you a proper answer.

It’s no secret by now that I had some difficulties in Minnesota. I came in with a huge chip on my shoulder over slipping in the SHL draft and was hellbent on proving everybody who’d passed on me wrong, and I know that did nothing to make me popular in the Monarchs locker room from the beginning. I doubt I was hiding my drinking problem half as well as I thought I was, which can’t have helped, but the writing was almost certainly on the wall when I kicked up sand over my contract.

This was back in the day when there was still a set orthodoxy for rookies and their first contracts. Doing the research, the draft class from the year before mine came in at $3 million a year, as did the draft class after mine; my class, the season 74 draftees for Minnesota, were signed at half a million per year less than that.

Yes, I know some of you are probably not very sympathetic to the plight of a rich athlete not earning all the millions he thought he deserved, but if you found out tomorrow that the guy at the desk opposite you who’d been at the company a year less was making more for the same work I don’t think you’d be very happy with it either. So when I went to the head office with agent Max in tow to get into the nuts and bolts of why, I’m pretty sure I cemented my reputation as a rabble-rouser.

It’s one thing to be objectionable when you’ve got others on your side: that makes you into a leader. When it’s just you…you don’t look good, especially not in an environment like a hockey locker room, where everybody needs to be on the same page or risk the book itself falling to pieces.

So it wasn’t much of a surprise to hear my name start to turn up in trade rumours. I don’t blame the Minnesota GMs for doing it - if you know one of your players is getting crispy over something you can’t really control any more, you don’t have too many options to deal with it and dealing high was a perfectly reasonable thing for them to do. You could argue that the right thing to do is to make sure the players you’ve paid less get made whole - I certainly did at the time - but they flipped me instead. Did it work out? I think that’s one for the hockey historians to argue over.

The Monarchs made me somebody else’s problem but let me clear, whatever my axes to grind with them were, Minnesota behaved like consummate professionals in the process. I didn’t immediately know I was going to be moved but I was given the opportunity to be involved in the discussions despite not having any kind of leverage or power in the situation. It would have been very easy to shove me off onto a bottom-feeding team for nothing as an act of petty vengeance - god knows that’s what I would have done in their position, which is why I’m not a GM. Minnesota were, put simply, good at this: they had people who took care of the admin work that goes into a trade, like ending leases on apartments and helping pack up a person's life in a matter of hours.

I wasn't unhappy with it. I knew, as soon as I started making waves about a subject as sensitive as money, that there was a good chance I'd be signing my death warrant in Minnesota but I was still young, still talented and still dripping with potential. A person can easily outwork a bad reputation if they put their mind to it and with all of that working in my favour, I had a much better shot at avoiding the "locker room cancer" label than most. And besides, I went to what I initially thought was going to be a contender. Edmonton had just led the league in regular season points and, yes, going down in five games to Los Angeles like they had was a bad series but hardly something to completely blow up the roster over, surely?

…yeah, that was an opinion that aged like milk on a hot radiator. The Blizzard firesale of S75 is still legendary for the speed and scope with which Edmonton tore their roster to pieces. Jack St. Clair, the faceoff god? Gone, sent east to the North Stars. Justin Time, the workhorse of the Edmonton crease? Hurled down the West Coast to San Francisco. All-everything forward Evan Winter? Ironically, parceled up and sent to the team that had just precipitated the teardown, the Los Angeles Panthers. Edmonton dropped sixty points in the league between seasons: not quite a record, but going from the best team in the league to nearly the worst in one season was enough to give even the most saturnine fan pause.

I left Minnesota the day after the trade had processed and flew straight north thinking I was going to join a contender; I walked into the Edmonton compound, having read a dozen messages of commiseration, realising I’d just been volunteered to play the role of Atlas, holding a team on my shoulders.

It was a strange feeling. Even from the first meetings I had with my coaches and new bosses, there were some oddly mixed messages - being traded (in part) for a blueline monster like Emil Egli meant some people were eager to push the burden of expectations on me, pumping me up as if they wanted a 22-year-old to step straight into the skates of one of the best to ever block a shot, but just as many were playing the realist angle and being both soft and hard at the same time about how bad the team was likely to be with or without me playing my hardest. I don’t even think it was delusion, everybody in the Blizzard organisation knew the team was going to be rancid for some years to come and it was all part of Operation Snowstorm. Not my choice of nickname, I hasten to add.

The season…I won’t belabor any points talking about it. It wasn’t quite as repugnant as some of the hockey community were projecting - although that losing streak to start the season was truly rough to live through, and even more so when we found out that the Patriotes had won their first game before us - but it was fairly demoralising. Maybe I had been spoiled by having so much success so early on, with the Team Norden three-peat, but I think most people would have had trouble being in a new environment and having to accustom yourself to scrolling down the league standings every morning. God knows it's hard to not just taken a physical beating night after night but to get the score run up on you with horrible frequency.

Although god knows it makes me laugh looking back and remembering that the last win in that season came at the expense of Minnesota. I wasn’t great - Emil Egli was -5.

After a few weeks with the Blizzard staff psychiatrist, I figured that OK, this was a process, but it was one I was clearly expected to be part of for the long haul. It was going to be a rough few years while the wide spread of draft picks coming into the Edmonton organisation matured and shaped up, but in maybe five seasons’ time there would be a ripe crop of fresh young talent, marinated in skill and oozing potential, ready to drag us back to the championship heights. And by that time, I’d be into a second contract, having cemented myself in the locker room as a leader, able to get everybody into the right mindset and pointed in the right direction. These were growing pains, nothing more.

Then they fucking traded me.

Talk about having the rug yanked out from under you.

I make a point of emphasising how good Minnesota were about the discussions and including me in everything because with Edmonton, it came so far out of the blue and so quickly I felt like I’d got whiplash. Even by the Blizzard standards, it was a shock: as far as I could tell, everybody in the GMs office felt the same way about me as I did and there weren’t even hints anything was on the table. From what I heard years later, the offer from the Argonauts was mainly them fishing - none of them expected it to be taken up because, valuable as a high first round pick was, it was seen as another step back for the Blizzard and something that was only going to put off the rebuild even further. But Operation Snowstorm clearly liked what they saw and, a few weeks after talking about signing long-term in Edmonton, I was packing my bags for the Pacific Northwest.

Let nobody tell you otherwise: hockey is a cut-throat business. Loyalty is prized in a locker room and you won’t have true success unless you have a group of players who buy in, both to the team’s culture and to one another. When a team showed me that were willing to put faith in me, I put them first to the point of once telling the Falcons they should trade me to make the inevitable rebuild quicker and easier. I thought Edmonton was going to be that same sort of environment and I think it was this moment that kicked me out of that mindset. I know I’ve been described as mercenary in the past, of being somebody concerned with keeping his own nest feathered ahead of sacrificing for a team, but in truth I think it’d take somebody truly saint-like to not think that way. Judge me if you want, but I make no apologies for it.

But all that said, Edmonton still did one thing that might have saved me from completely flaming out, even if it was by accident, because sending me to Seattle meant a juniors reunion. The Argonauts had picked up some of the best players in the J during my time there but more importantly, had gone to the Falcons three times: Will Tomlander, Kal Akar Kekkonen and Jimothee Penjiman. And I can tell you this with no fear of contradiction - I would have spiraled out of control anywhere else.