Less than year after surprise trade from Detroit, Jake Walman is in the Stanley Cup Final
It's the deal that never made sense and probably never will.
The Detroit Red Wings’ season has been over for 43 days, the ninth consecutive season to end without a playoff appearance.
Jake Walman, meanwhile, has been playing regular hockey during that time and on Thursday helped the Edmonton Oilers punch their ticket to the Stanley Cup Final with a 6-3 victory in Game 5 against the Dallas Stars.
It’s also been less than a year since the Red Wings traded Walman and a second-round pick to the San Jose Sharks for future considerations.
That deal has been one of the most perplexing of Steve Yzerman’s tenure in Detroit, especially after Walman was later traded this season from San Jose to Edmonton for Carl Berglund and a first-round pick.
Yzerman hasn’t and isn’t willing to give more on his thought process on what happened in that trade. He dodged direct questions about it at the time and then when asked about it a month ago, at his season-ended press conference, he simply said, “no and no” when someone asked for more on the Walman deal.
Walman, who I spoke with Thursday morning before Game 5 of the Western Conference Final, said he still hasn’t gotten any larger clarification of why he was traded by the Red Wings.
He was told it was for “cap reasons,” and that’s the only explanation he was ever given and that message was relayed from his agent, not Yzerman directly.
Walman wanted to stay in Detroit, he was looking forward to being part of the long-term build, and told me on Thursday that overall he really enjoyed experience playing for the Red Wings and he had been looking forward to more community involvement.
Walman does his best to ignore it, but he’s also well aware of the speculation and outside search for a reasoning to justify the trade Yzerman made. How that there must be a smoking gun, something that will lead to that “ahhh” moment for fans to justify the deal.
That moment, Walman said, doesn’t exist.
Sure, he was dealing with injury at the end of his time in Detroit, he says he was open with the team about that. But that injury never came up as reason from the Red Wings why they would ship him out.
And now he can’t help but chuckle when thinking about how it’s led to such additional conversation and consternation back in Detroit since he’s been gone.
The only person who really knows why Walman was traded is Yzerman, and as I’ve reported before, it’s a deal that was stunning for San Jose to even be offered in that fashion, who eventually happily flipped him for a first-round pick to add to their rebuild.
And because of that mystery, most of the discussion around that trade has been from a Red Wings perspective. How or why it was or wasn’t the right move for Detroit.
That’s a fine discussion, especially with some serious questions now about how Yzerman will actually deliver on his own championship mandate. But it’s also a public discussion about assets and values that overshadows the actual human element of the deal, how it turned into the best possible scenario for Walman.
On the ice Walman’s game took another step. First with the Sharks as a No. 1 defender playing close to 23 minutes a night. Then as a supporting piece in Edmonton where his game has fit extremely well with the Oilers quick defense-to-offense philosophy — Walman had two assists on Thursday, both secondaries on transition plays through the neutral zone.
Winning certainly makes things easier, but Walman’s also more at ease off the ice in Edmonton. Or better yet, Edmonton is more willing to embrace players with their own swagger that don’t always fit into hockey’s neat-and-tidy clichéd boxes.
He’s able to be himself without fear of retribution or admonishment, hockey’s a game again and games are supposed to be fun.
If there’s a lesson from this, it’s how optics and transparency make a difference within an organization. Yzerman’s unwillingness to give any real justification from the beginning begot further speculation and created a world where his rare media availabilities become littered with questions from the past that he clearly doesn’t want to answer.
Whether Yzerman’s at peace with that or not, we’ll never know. But as for Walman, he’s got Game 1 of the Stanley Cup Final to prep for.