Jack Roslovic Adds His Name To An Already Strange Jets Off-Season

The 2018-19 NHL season is technically still ongoing at the moment, but the Jets have already had a crazy off-season with all sorts of rumors of locker-room strife, players about to be traded, players possibly asking or not asking for trade out of Winnipeg, a former hockey goon “breaking” a trade that nobody actually believed him on but still had a good laugh over, and now reports that Jack Roslovic has fired his agent, hired Claude Lemieux to be his new agent with word also getting out that Roslovic demanded a trade out of Winnipeg at least once, if not multiple times.

It started Wednesday afternoon with Aaron Porzline of The Athletic tweeting the following about Roslovic and his agent situation:

The interesting part about that – aside from the news he was joining an agency group who is the head of North American hockey for 4Sports – is that at the end of the Jets season there had been some speculation on the part of Elliotte Friedman that Roslovic would want a bigger responsibility on the ice be it in Winnipeg or somewhere else.

The Winnipeg News’ Mike McIntyre then added on saying that Roslovic’s frustration had been well known.

Mike doesn’t specifically mention that there was a trade request, but he also doesn’t deny and “many chats” with the general manager would lead one to believe that requests were certainly made. Although this information popping up does lead to wonder why it wasn’t a news item back in February/March.

Thankfully about an hour later we had clarification of the whole situation from Roslovic’s now-former agent Ken Robinson who took to Twitter himself to clear the air.

There is little doubt Jack Roslovic has a bright future – we stated as much last week in his yearly player review – but while he needs to continue to show improvement and a consistency in his game, some of the onus is also on Paul Maurice and the coaching staff to put him in positions and lines that will help him succeed. Giving him limited fourth line minutes certainly isn’t ideal.

This Jack Roslovic drama – if we can call it that – is just one more interesting plot line to add to what is shaping up to be the most interesting and perhaps most critical summer in Winnipeg hockey history. We can’t wait for tomorrow when the next headline will be Mathieu Perreault cutting himself in a shaving accident or some sort of crazy headline like that.