This is turning into a soap opera. Via Paul Kukla of Kukla’s Korner/Abel to Yzerman comes a report that we don’t necessarily need to know…But it is the bottom line as to why Jacob Trouba doesn’t want to accept an in-place deal to send him to the Detroit Red Wings.
The New York Post’s Larry Brooks expounds upon the “family reasons” that Trouba is probably rejecting the trade, and at this point, it’s both good to know–and the kind of stuff that he doesn’t need to explain, as a professional athlete and family with a personal life:
When Trouba signed this current seven-year, $56M contract in July of 2019 after having been acquired as a pending restricted free agent from Winnipeg, his five-year no-movement clause was designed to expire in conjunction with his wife Kelly Tyson-Trouba’s completion of her three-year residency at a New York hospital.
But Dr. Tyson-Trouba’s residency was deferred for a year at the start so that the program which she is required to complete will end instead on July 1, 2025. The Troubas also welcomed their first child, a boy named Axel, in mid-January.
There is no guarantee that Jacob Trouba would accept a trade even to a club on his approved list if that means leaving his wife and nine-month-old (as of training camp) behind. It is not as if Dr. Tyson-Trouba can pick up, transfer her credits to another hospital, accompany her husband and still be licensed as a physician.
We are told that has become part of the league-wide conversation, with several teams that otherwise would have been in big-time on Trouba now likely to wait until next year when Dr. Tyson-Trouba’s residency ends with the defenseman having one final season on his contract.
Continued; the sticky wicket of this is obvious here, and it’s not just a matter of propriety: it’s not Kelly Trouba’s fault that she’s got a child and a career to think about…
And a decent minority of the fans who have followed this story line might very well blame Mrs. Trouba for not “sucking it up” and following her husband where the Rangers want to trade him, because that’s a sizeable minority of sports fans for you.
That’s not how life works. And now that we know the source of these “family issues,” let’s put the trade talk to rest and leave the Troubas alone to deal with the complications when personal lives and professional sports collide.
