Via KK: Jonathan Bernier explains why he left the Wings for New Jersey

This story comes from a Tweet from Kukla’s Korner’s Paul Kukla, pointing out a story from The Hockey News’s Matt Larkin.

Larkin has written an article in which former Red Wings goaltender Jonathan Bernier explains why he left the Wings to sign with the New Jersey Devils as an unrestricted free agent (after a short detour to Carolina in the Alex Nedeljkovic trade), and it sounds like Bernier wasn’t happy on the ice in Detroit:

Despite the pride in his individual effort, playing on a team going nowhere weighed on him. By his age-32 season, he’d started five career playoff games. It was hard to block out the notion that, despite his outstanding year, he was the tree falling in the forest that didn’t make a sound. He couldn’t move the needle on a team in a scorched-earth rebuild, and that tested his morale.

“It is easy to get on that train, to be honest,” Bernier said. “Living in Toronto where expectations were very high, I was there through the rebuild, and I took a lot on my shoulders, and probably that’s why I was out of there – because I stopped focusing on my own job and worried too much about what was going on the outside. Coming into Detroit with the rebuild, I’d lived it in Toronto on a much bigger scale in a bigger market, and that gave me a lot of experience and confidence that I could just worry about my own job.

“But you’re playing every year to make the playoffs, so it’s tough when you hear that we’re just going to be OK and hopefully get a great draft pick and all these things. As players you don’t get many opportunities to win a Stanley Cup, but it’s really hard just to make the playoffs. So it’s tough mentally. You want to win, you want to play in the playoffs, you play 82 games just to make it in, so it’s not fun when you’re out of it at mid-season.”

Continued, with an explanation from Devils senior advisor Martin Brodeur as to why the Devils pursued Bernier’s services…

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George Malik

My name is George Malik, and I'm the Malik Report's editor/blogger/poster. I have been blogging about the Red Wings since 2006, when MLive hired me to work their SlapShots blog, and I joined Kukla's Korner in 2011 as The Malik Report. I'm starting The Malik Report as a stand-alone site, hoping that having my readers fund the website is indeed the way to go to build a better community and create better content.