This morning, The Athletic’s Max Bultman released an excellent feature (behind a paywall), in which Bultman sat down with former Detroit Red Wings defenseman Jake Walman, discussing the complex emotion of the baffling trade that sent Walman to San Jose over the summer.
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At the end of June, the Red Wings dealt Walman (who had spent most of the past two seasons on Detroit’s top defense pair, playing to the left of Moritz Seider) and a second round pick to the Sharks. The number of “un-tradable” players around the NHL is realistically a small one, but what made the Walman deal downright shocking was the return, or lack thereof. In return for a cost-controlled top air defenseman, the Red Wings got…”future considerations,” which is to say nothing at all.
“I just thought I’d built such a strong foundation in Detroit, not just with the team but in Detroit,” Walman told Bultman. “My heart was there, you know? I wanted to bring that success and passion to Detroit. It was my first time, like I’ve said to you before, that I felt like I was in a place that loved me, and I loved that place. It was my first time feeling comfortable in a city. That was it, kind of just over in a flash, like that.”
Also of interest from the interview is Walman clarifying the ambiguous language used around his health status at the end of last season, when he was described confusingly as somewhere between a healthy scratch and injured/unavailable. “I was pretty badly injured, and I was doing everything I could to play through it,” he explained. “Trying to give myself a chance every day to be in the lineup. And got to a point where there was like five, six games in a row where I was like really hinder(ed) on the ice, and to the point where it was tough doing everyday things, like getting out of bed, and all that [stuff]. Lower-body injury.”
Of course, enlightening though Walman’s perspective is, it does little to explain why the Red Wings would willingly move on from a player who had been a top-pair D-man and shown outstanding chemistry with a franchise cornerstone in Seider. The good news for Walman is that he’s found a robust role waiting for him in San Jose. Six games into his tenure as a Shark, the 28-year-old is averaging 23:26 in ice time, up about four minutes from his average in his final season in Detroit.
