Recently there has been ALOT of talk about the Winnipeg Jets trading their young scoring superstar Patrik Laine with the most recent news being Eliotte Friedman saying on a Buffalo sports radio station, WGR550, that there’s a decent chance Laine will get traded.

While trades are a normal part of hockey and sports in general, we urge Mark Chipman, Kevin Cheveldayoff, and the Winnipeg Jets not to trade Patrik Laine away and here are the reasons why:

• Age and Potential - Patrik Laine is still just 22 years old (!!!) and aside from his 2018-2019 season where there wasn’t much of an improvement, he has only gotten better and better each year with last season being a prime example of him being an all-around player
• Statistics - Simply put, pure goalscorers and well rounded players as good as Laine do not just grow on trees. On the more advanced side, is just the tip of the iceberg but amongst league players Laine is 24th on total offence, 28th on powerplay offence, 31st on even strength offence and 96th on GAR (goals above replacement; as DTMAboutHeart defines it, a metric that shows how many additional goals per sixty minutes of ice time a player accounts for compared to a replacement level player) ever since he entered the league. All this while playing the first three seasons with Bryan Little and this year with Kyle Connor whom both of which weren’t much of a fit with Laine’s style of play. It’s very likely his total impact is higher if put in the right situation, and even so he still ranks 96th in the NHL and 3rd on the Jets in impact since entering the league and that’s from the ages of 18-22.
• Club Reputation - The Jets still have control of Patrik Laine’s rights for several more years because of his RFA status. It’s seriously not a good look for the organization to be trading away a young superstar when he’s not being deployed properly in the first place, given how hard it is already for Winnipeg to land other players and free agents. What will other NHL players, potential NHL players, and people outside of Winnipeg think?
• Usage - Patrik Laine has expressed that he would love to have a center that can play well with him. We have seen success when he’s playing with Mark Scheifele and more notably when the two of them are playing with Nikolaj Ehlers too but he hasn’t been given a proper chance to play with Mark Scheifele ever since his career started here. People will point out that he played most of his 5v5 time with Scheifele last year but there are also other several factors why that line didn’t work out. Now there’s the case for finding a 2C - why would we want to fill a hole by creating more holes? Wasn’t the reason for trying to find a 2C in the first place was that someone can play with Laine? Laine was responsible for alot of the team’s scoring and powerplay goals, and our powerplay has notably been bad already, it will only get worse if he’s traded away.
• Marketability - Patrik Laine has a very unique personality for a hockey world that is full of bland characters. He is one of Finland’s most famous athletes and is one of the reasons why the Jets have a fanbase in Finland. He is also a young player that caters to kids and teens because of his love of video games, most especially Fornite and has been proven by his Twitch streams that have surpassed thousands of views during the season hiatus.

A petition like this probably wouldn’t do much, but we hope that the amount of support from this would atleast make a noise and help the Winnipeg Jets reconsider their stance in trading Patrik Laine away.