The last part happens in St Louis as well because of who she is. So that shouldnt matter too much. I just have a hard time sympathizing with rich people having to live in a cold and boring city for five years (well 4ish years since I doubt they would summer there).
At least with Luongo there were some other underlying issues with the team itself and it seemed like both sides wanted to move on.
i think there's a huge difference between being an anonymous super rich person in st louis and a super visible celebrity's wife in edmonton. i mean, i don't see any other walmart heiresses being reported on in st louis newspapers like it's a tabloid so i seriously doubt that comparison holds any water.
i remember how hard edmonton and its media was on gretzky's wife around the time of the trade too. there was all the, that's what you get for marrying an actress and calling her yoko and she thinks she's too good for edmonton. but in the end, they moved to LA and she immediately stopped acting and modeling and started pumping out kids. but can you even imagine the difference between their relative anonymity in LA vs having to be the wife of the most famous person in the history of edmonton? that said, we also now know it almost certainly wasn't their choice to move.
with luongo, the issue isn't when they finally left. because the team was good, luongo gutted it out in vancouver for a lot of years. but the issue was back in 2008, when his wife was having a difficult pregnancy and the vultures in our media reported on it. there was daily speculation about where she was, and taking shots at him flying to be with her on off-days while they were in the stretch run of a playoff race. you had jackasses saying, "he's being paid xxx millions to concentrate on playing" on the radio call-in shows. it was really awful. his relationship with the city was never the same, and in the end his wife moved back to miami. he also never got all the way back to his pre-2008 level of play, but i've always imagined that's just a step some guys lose when they become parents and their 100% focus turns into a little less than that.
that said i don't think anybody in this thread is really asking for your sympathy. we're just answering the question of what happened to precipitate him asking for a trade out of town.
On Chicklets he kept saying the Oilers didn't come thru on their end on promises
i think that's probably true to some degree. there is a sort of misogynistic how-dare-she article from one of the edmonton papers that's floating around looking back on the pronger debacle a year or two later, and it mentions how the oilers in like 2007 or '08 ended up building a team to take care of players' families after they move there.
this is something that also fell apart in vancouver in the last decade. after the team's very expensive contending years, ownership slashed the budget and they dismantled all of the competitive advantages of the luongo/sedins/kesler era. some of that was facilities, special training coaches, dieticians, sleep doctors, and other performance-related stuff, but another was staff to take care of players and their families' transitions. so rookie nikita tryamkin shows up in vancouver with his wife or girlfriend, he's like 21 years old and iirc they don't really speak english. they left back to russia after two years, but there were reports that they felt super isolated, didn't like where they lived, and after he signed back with the kHL there was a long quote about
vancouver feeling like a drug den. from the context clues, he probably lived near the arena, likely too close to chinatown and the downtown east side for their comfort. but again, this is where a competent organization would have found them either an apartment to rent in yaletown or if they wanted to be more residential a house near some of the older players. they would have set tryamkin's wife/gf up with some of the other players' families to be taken under their wing and acclimated, reach out to the russian community to give them some build-in friends like they did for young bure once upon a time (which they did after spectacularly failing larionov and krutov and larionov flat out telling them it was necessary). but instead, they just left two 21 year olds who i don't think spoke the language well to their own devices within probably a five minute walk of the opioid crisis capital of canada.
that's also not to say that where the probably lived was legitimately dangerous, because it's not. i can picture the towers they probably lived in and i used to work near there and walked through those streets he's complaining about all the time. but i can also see how without any context, if you walk down one street instead of another it can feel like you're in the mission district in the 80s. but that's just a matter of someone on the team's staff saying, before you rent anything call me, and then when they found that apartment saying, no you want to be two blocks farther west and a few blocks to the south. but in a vacuum, living within walking distance of the arena seems like a good idea right?
Won't post it don't have a link but have a great source who played with him and told me.
