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Mental health: Jacob Trouba strongly denounces Spittin’ Chiclets’ comments

 Andrew Taylor
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Mental health: Jacob Trouba strongly denounces Spittin’ Chiclets’ comments
Credit: Photo by Jared Silber/NHLI via Getty Images

More and more, the subject of mental health is the talk of the sports world. Whether it’s initiatives by various organizations or players opening up about their difficulties, it’s becoming more and more widespread.

In Montreal, the cases of Jonathan Drouin and Carey Price attracted a great deal of attention.

Today, however, it’s the Rangers’ organization that’s getting the attention.

More specifically, it’s the team captain, Jacob Trouba.

Via his X account today, the defenseman shared an excerpt from the Spittin’ Chiclets podcast, in which Pasha Eshghi rather harshly criticizes Trouba not only for his play on the ice, but also for certain aspects of his personal life.

And the defender denounced the whole thing, saying that we need to do better, recalling in particular the large number of suicide cases in the world of professional sports, including the case of golfer Grayson Murray, who recently took his own life.

Listening to the clip, it’s pretty clear that Eshghi isn’t a big fan of the defender, and you can sense that his criticisms of him are quite personal. He calls him “the worst captain in the NHL” and “a puppy lost in his own zone”, while saying that he’s so bad that Rangers fans should have wished Trouba had been suspended in the last playoffs.

Eshghi then goes on to discredit Trouba’s leadership of the Mark Messier Trophy, before delving into the defenseman’s personal life and asserting that his wife, who studied neuroscience, should educate him on the effects of concussions to make him think twice before inflicting such a fate “on a daily basis” on his opponents.

Clearly, he put on more than the customer asked for.

On the one hand, Eshghi is there to put on a show, and falling on the head of a guy like Trouba, who isn’t the most popular guy in hockey, is an easy way to do it. On the other hand, though, you get the feeling that the criticism was more personal than anything else and, above all, was blown out of proportion.

Not exactly constructive criticism, let’s say.

The good news is that Trouba wants to try and make the best of the situation. The defender, who uses painting as a means of escape, will be selling paintings with the aim of donating the money to the Athletes For Hope foundation, which aims to help athletes’ mental health.

Criticism has its place in the sports world, as does partisanship, but gratuitous and personal insults have no place, no matter how much a player earns or what uniform he wears.

And in this case, the line has been crossed.


In bursts

– He’ll have to be again if he wants to win the Stanley Cup.

– An interesting point of view.

– A tough defeat for the Montreal team.

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