“For having a broken wrist, he played pretty darn good. To me, the sky’s the limit for him. He could be one of the best defencemen in the league.” — Andrew Ladd, Winnipeg Jets captain, on Jacob Trouba
You won’t get Jacob Trouba to feel sorry for himself.
So what if he has battled with three significant injuries within a year? Who cares if he’s been stuck on 65 games played in each of his first two NHL seasons?
The 21-year-old with the omnipresent smile, classic hockey mullet and resurrected Instagram account doesn’t believe he’s cursed. He feels lucky.
“I’ve actually been really fortunate with injuries over my career. The neck thing happened, and that was kind of a fluky thing, then my hand got broken, [but] the four or five years prior to that I hadn’t been hurt,” the Jets six-foot-two, 200-pound defenceman told Sportsnet last week.
“That’s just how it goes. I don’t think I’m unlucky. It’s just part of the game. The neck was more scary, definitely, but the hand lingered for a while. I went back and forth [with it feeling right]. Hopefully it stays away now forever.”
Trouba played the final two games of Winnipeg’s first-round sweep at the hands of the Anaheim Ducks with a broken bone in his right hand. He skated in Games 3 and 4 despite only being able to grip his stick with two fingers. The hand required off-season surgery, but Trouba says he’s good to go for camp.
The kid spent his summer in Florida training, beach-bumming and growing out his party-in-the-back while feasting on fresh mahi-mahi. (He beams when detailing his excursion to the Keys, where he hauled in dinners for days: “They have to be at least 22 or 24 inches to keep ’em, and we caught 15 of them.”)
In between the neck fright at the 2014 IIHF World Championship and the busted mitt, Trouba was sidelined mid-season by a wrist injury, one that coincided with injuries to fellow D-men Mark Stuart, Zach Bogosian and Tobias Enstrom. Yet despite the rash of injuries to their blueline, the Jets kept winning.
“It speaks to what we’ve built and our drafting, putting a good team on the ice when we have four of our better defencemen hurt,” Trouba said. “It shows what kind of depth we have. We have a lot of good defencemen on our team that can play, and we have a lot of young ones coming up.”
To many, including Ladd, Trouba is still the one on the rise. The ninth-overall pick of the 2012 draft has captured five medals with Team USA internationally, but we’re just scratching the surface of what he can do in the NHL.
Through 130 games, he has 17 goals, 34 assists and a plus-6 rating, but — health permitting — this could be the season he breaks out in a major way.
He has set specific personal goals for 2015-16, but those don’t include statistics.
“Numbers come when they come,” he says. “In the D zone, I want to be better in my own end, just moving the puck up the ice, and maybe jump up in the play more without the puck, try to find the gap.”
Trouba says that prior to each game he looks at the opposing roster and picks the brains of the Jets’ more experienced defencemen in order to learn the forwards’ tendencies.
And he’s gleaned a valuable lesson from the team’s greatest blueline presence (in every sense), Dustin Byfuglien.
“He’s Buff. He’s different than everybody else, for sure,” said Trouba. “He’s a jokester. But the biggest thing I’ve learned from him is that when it’s time to work, you work. There’s time for fun and games, and then there’s times when you gotta put on your work boots and go out there and do what you get paid to do. That’s the biggest thing I’ve took from him.”
One-Timers with Jacob Trouba
On taking a break from social media: “I always knew I was going to come back to it, but it’s always good to take some time off, try not to look at it. You can get too attached to something. I just found I was always on Twitter and Instagram, so I figured I’d give it a break for a while. I don’t like being on my phone all the time; I find myself on my phone too often.
“The [Jets] encourage you to be on it. People enjoy it, but it can hurt you as much as it can help you.”
On the forward he most fears: “Probably [Alex] Ovechkin. Not that I don’t know what he’s going to do, but even though I know, he’ll still pull it off. That’s the scary part. He’s definitely a pretty special player.”
On the shot he does not want to block: “Shea Weber. I’ve seen one whiz by me, that’s for sure. I don’t know if one’s ever hit me. You don’t want to be playing defence on a penalty kill when he’s blasting one-timers from the right side.”
