Star goaltender 'has made it very clear he doesn’t want to stay.'

One of the National Hockey League's most well respected goaltenders has reportedly been on the trading block for some time now, but new comments from on the the league's top insiders indicates that the decision may not be coming from the team, but from the goalie himself. 

As many of our readers will know by now the Columbus Blue Jackets have been dealing with a rather difficult situation considering that both forward Artemi Panarin and goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky are expected to be gone by the end of the season, both players that are integral parts of what the Blue Jackets do on a nightly basis. That being said though it sounds like in the case of Bobrovsky in particular there is a ton of bad blood behind the scenes, and that may be making the situation much worse for Columbus.

"I think there has been a lot of frustration with Bobrovsky, and the frustration goes back to the summer," said Sportsnet insider Elliotte Friedman as per Nichols on Hockey. "Jarmo Kekalainen set up a meeting with both Panarin and Bobrovsky in the summer to talk to them about this year, and Panarin went to the meeting and Bobrovsky blew it off."

"Bobrovsky was apparently upset about some things they said about him at the end of last year, two years ago. I don’t know if he’s right or wrong about that. Everybody interprets things different ways. But I know the organization was upset about the fact that Bobrovsky blew off that meeting."

Needless to say that's never the kind of comment you want to hear about the relationship between any player and his team and it becomes even worse when that player is expected to be your number one goaltender. It gets worse however as according to Friedman's comments it sounds like Bobrovsky  himself is all but done with the Blue Jackets organization.

“Bobrovsky - to be honest, I think they would like to keep him too, but he has made it very clear he doesn’t want to stay. I think that meeting caused them a lot of frustration. I think at times they felt he hasn’t been as focused on the day-to-day details as maybe Panarin or some of the other players have been. I think that’s made it very difficult at times between them. They’ve been frustrated with his attitude. They’ve tried to give Joonas Korpisalo basically the job."

It sounds like there's only one way this can go now, and I fully expect Bobrovsky will be gone by the trade deadline.