0629: A quick note. The Dive sit, once again, in the 9 spot this morning. What a shame. And hey...how bad are they defensively? This bad. Of the 8 teams ahead of them in the West, 7 of those teams have scored fewer goals than Denver. Of those eight teams, wanna guess how many have let in fewer goals? Good job. 7.
0547: Updated below to include Gramps’ new additions to the HockeyTown Todd stable of writers and a number of stories from the Canadian media.
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Today’s a good day for the Diggers. A good day. Collectively they show a little spine, a little initiative.
Khan(!), still sad and confused about the lies Mike Babcock told him earlier this week, tries to redeem himself with a good piece on the ease with which thousands of people are taking their home-state Wings for granted. I read the article about fifteen minutes ago and it hasn’t been deleted from MLive yet, so that’s a good sign. Helene St. James causes a bit of an uproar with her interpretation of Uncle Mikey’s comments to the media yesterday and Ryan The Temp (John Niyo) returns to the Detroit News cycle of brilliance.
We’ll have those stories and more, next, on this edition of Thursday with the Diggers.
First of all, we head out of town, into St. Louis, the land of bitterness and dashed hockey hopes. Manny Legace’s the starting goaltender there. Were you aware of that? Not real fond of Manny in these parts, not around here. Didn’t like his martyrdom or his tendencies to run his frigging trap to the press. Talented? Yes. But just real dumb. Sound familiar?
St. Louis Blues goalie Manny Legace surprised the franchise’s front office Tuesday, saying he’ll probably need additional surgery on his right knee after the season.
“To be honest with you guys, I have to say I heard that for the first time tonight,” Murray said. “I have no idea what Manny was talking about.
“It’s possible he could require some minor surgery, but I don’t know where Manny was coming from.”
Team president John Davidson also said Legace’s comments came as a surprise to him.
“I would think that at the end of the season, he’d re-evaluate the situation and see if he needs surgery or not,” Davidson said. “As far as I know, I don’t think there’s anything in stone.
“Manny said what he said. If he thinks at the end of the year he’ll need surgery, he’ll have surgery.”
Woops. Kinda saw that coming didn’t we? It was around Christmas two years ago that The Mouth revealed an injury to the Detroit press then politicked with the Diggers to get his starting job back, letting Mike Babcock know through the media the condition of his injury. It was the beginning of the end. But as it turned out? That was just Manny being Manny. He likes him some microphones. Have fun Blues fans. The real Manny Legace just stood up.
On to Detroit, the hockey town that can’t sell out, the hockey town that Michigan forgot. Too strong? Maybe. Khan(!) does a nice job of recognizing some factors that have kept the Detroit sports fan away from the JLA this season. I’ve got my own reasons that we’ll get to in a minute.
Last week, on the same night the Red Wings played in Montreal for the first time in four years, the Tigers shocked the baseball world with a blockbuster trade that landed them Miguel Cabrera and Dontrelle Willis. And the Red Wings’ current seven-game winning streak has been overshadowed by the Michigan football coaching search-turned-soap opera and the Lions’ collapse. If that wasn’t enough, the Pistons are also off to a hot start.
It’s a sound argument, one that carries a little more weight with me than “the economy.” Khan(!)’s telling us the attention span of the Michigan sports fan is a little too short to expect them to be able to focus on the Wings and all else that’s going on around town these days. Well? Who determines the priorities? Do you, the sports fan? Naturally, you have the final say so, but who sets the agenda? The columnists, that’s who. The guy with the big ears, the other one with the big gut, the bitter one who’s relegated to covering prep sports now. Albom, Wojnowski, Foster, Parker, Sharp, Rosenberg. Six columnists in Detroit. You may not agree with what they write, but you read it. And what you read affects your level of interest.
Having made that startling claim, I’ll give you something else to think about. Of the last 65 columns written by Albom, Wojo, Parker, Sharp or Rosenberg...guess how many have been Wing-related.
Yep. Zero.
And here we are, full circle. Time for my yearly rant. The columnists in Detroit can all kiss my ass. April hockey writers..all of them. Who the hell is Bob Wojnowski to even discuss Red Wing hockey on the radio when he won’t waddle down to the Joe to write about the best team in hockey--by a long shot. We won’t even dwell on The Delicate Genius. Maybe Oprah can pry a few Wing observations out of him next time they’re crying together on TV. Rosenberg? That’s the biggest disappointment because I like the way he writes. But...too bad, because he ignores your Wings too.
Best team in hockey. Arguably three of the five top players in hockey. A dynasty. The most successful sports team in the state’s history. Zero columns out of the last 65. And that’s just as far back as I looked. It’s not like 66 was devoted to the Wings. I’d be surprised if that number wasn’t closer to 100. You want a reason for Wing fan apathy, take a look at that gaggle of “journalists.”
John Niyo? He’s not included in that. I like that kid. You know who he is? He’s frigging Ryan from The Office, the funniest show ever invented. He’s Ryan the temp to Ted Kulfan’s Michael Scott.
Niyo’s the occasional Wing writer, and it’s too bad that’s not more permanent. I think he avoids it because he doesn’t want to be associated with the Diggers, but he pops in from time to time like he does today--discussing the fact that the Wings have stolen from Bubba to cure some woe.
Times are tough. Tough enough, in fact, that the Red Wings, the standard-bearers for success in the NHL the last two decades, have turned to a teetering expansion franchise for help.
In an attempt to halt sagging attendance at Joe Louis Arena and reclaim the “Hockeytown” crown Sports Illustrated unceremoniously bequeathed to the Minnesota Wild last week, the Wings have hired a new vice president of business affairs. Enter Steve Violetta, who leaves a similar position he held with the Nashville Predators?
“It’s Hockeytown instead of Honkytonk town, right?” Violetta joked Monday, shortly after meeting the staff at Joe Louis Arena.
Idiotic joke from Violetta aside, it’s a good article that betrays the Kulfan style of Digging. Niyo actually, sit down, talks to more than one person to write his story. Fans, Pistons execs, Wing staffers...real digging, instead of the surface garbage Michael Scott throws at us thumb tapping his stories from his couch on his Blackberry.
Helene St. James had her speakerphone going yesterday, listening in on the Babcock press conference. Man, a Digger’s dream. News coming to you. Can’t beat that. She posted part of the transcript last night and this statement’s causing a bit of a ruckus.
Kenny often jokes about it, the day Nick retires, he’s going to have a press conference about six seconds after him to announce his retirement. Nick drives the bus here.
Comments at the Freep from genius readers lead me to believe a few think Uncle Mike may have been serious, that Ken Holland has tied his future plans to Nick Lidstrom’s. Logical? Perhaps. But, let’s remember a couple things: (a) who was doing the talking and (2) who was doing the talking.
More to follow later today. Edmonton in town tonite. Live blog? Most definitely. Rumor has it the Oil bloggers may be dropping in.
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A few updates for you, because I like you all. First, let’s head to Gramps’ place where the cranky SOB has gone ahead and stolen more A2Y readers.
Nathan’s been a valuable contributor to the A2Y wit machine for several months. Now he writes for Gramps. Neat.
You know who I used to hate? The Edmonton Oilers. I’m not old enough to be upset at them for keeping a budding Steve Yzerman out of playoff history (at the time, that is), but I sure as hell will never forget the 2006 Stanley Cup Playoffs where some snaggle-tooth from Eastern Europe kneed the puck into the collective face of Wings fans across the globe. And before the comments come pouring in, I’m well aware that the Wings have more than a few Europeans with dental problems of their own.
Now though? Not so much hate. You could say that I am grateful for the Oil for a couple of reasons…
First, anything that had any impact on kicking Manny Legace out of town is noble in my book.
There are more than a few statements in that post I wish I’d come up with myself, which is the most fantastic compliment I can give anyone ever in history. Good catch Gramps. Nathan’s a huge addition.
Dougie? He’s been there for a few days.
On a blog where I can operate without the need to be particularly insightful, deal with statistics, think deeply, use more than four syllable words, or be “nice” three days in a row, ya know,this might work out OK.
Add Baroque’s frequent manifestos and Gramps’ statistical pessimism and all of a sudden HTT has become a force to be reckoned with. Dammit.
Plenty of Canadian praise headed to Hockeytown today, most resulting from the Uncle’s presser yesterday. Read shockingly similar stories at the links neatly listed below:
As somebody who is regrettably driving along without either a laptop handy or a Crackberry, I can tell you first-hand that a Red Wings win will get five minutes of talk on WDFN or “The Ticket” (WXYT), and the next fifty-five will be about Tayshaun Prince’s hangnail.
It’s ridiculous how the print, TV, and radio media in Detroit still take their marching orders from the New York-based conglomerates that own them, and that the Red Wings organization has never made a fuss of the fact that a town that seems to do just fine supporting an NHL team, an OHL team, a few college hockey teams, and a USA Hockey National Team Development Program that happens to have employed all those fancy U.S.-born names that are getting attention (like Patrick Kane), et. al. gets shafted because the sports editors must somehow come to an agreement that it’s time for the twenty-fifth column about how U of M talked to some guy from the University of Underwater Basket Weaving who doesn’t want to coach their football team....
But the Wings have never liked the media, since the days that Jimmy Devellano himself was the Wings’ PR department, and all he leaked really did stay in the Windsor Star, the Red Wings have never had a good relationship with the media. These days, anything that gets handed out, whether it be in the print, visual, or audio media seems to have to be hand-checked by Hahn (I’ve seen conference call transcripts that are published ten minutes after the calls are over, and it took the Wings something like three hours to give NHL.com the OK to post the transcript of Babs’ presser), the censorship of the media is aided by the fact that the Wings being such a pain in the ass to work with means that it’s usually not worth it to grind one’s hump to get a really insightful piece of commentary from one of the Wings’ refreshingly glib players or the coach who uses every bit of his master’s degree in sports psychology, despite the fact that he sounds like a Saskatchewan farmboy while doing it, when it either ends up on the back page, is swallowed up by 55 minutes of talk about the Tigers’ pitching situation in DECEMBER, or skipped because Bernie Smilovitz wants to show another “classic arcade” clip of the squirrel that learned how to water ski.
And, for the record, us bloggers are liked even less by the Wings’ front office than the media. We’re like the ninth circle of hell or something…
The Wings’ website is coming around in terms of at least posting clips of the post-game scrums, but ticket prices have shot right back up, save the few $9 seats they sell in person (that’s right, the Wings are charging an average of $54 for you to go down and see the Oilers tonight, all over again), the Fire On Ice commercials (while it’s great to see a commercial actually advertising Wings tickets on the 11 o’clock news and all) are as far as the marketing department has gone in promoting the players or team, and while the organization seems heartily content to have racked up its one open practice of the year, the media’s back to talking about how it’s terrible that Coachy the sock puppet from Nietzschean Sock Puppet Theatre University has admitted that this year’s performance of Franz Kafka’s “Das Urteil” is more important to him than coaching the University of Michigan’s football team for hours and hours on end.
On top of it all, Jimmy Devellano actually had the balls to tell Ye Olde Windsor Star that Violetta’s hiring had nothing to do with the Wings’ ticket sale issues.
Progress is progress, and the fact that the Wings’ website is much more than a placeholder is great and all, but there’s more work to be done, because the Wings were actually talked about on WDFN for about 20 minutes yesterday as Stoney and Wojo decided to ask fans whether they’d rather go see the Wings play the St. Louis Blues or the Pistons play, and a whole bunch of people not only said that they’d rather see the Pistons because the game’s more exciting, the game presentation is better and “involves the fans” more, they don’t have to pee in a trough, etc., but the disturbing part was that the vast majority thereof seemed either clueless to the fact that the Red Wings have actual players who really drop their gloves on occasion, that the Red Wings actually skate a fast, aggressive, fun-to-watch game, or they simply stated that the Wings’ players’ personalities weren’t apparent.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch:
Posted by George James Malik from South Lyon, MI on 12/13 at 06:42 AM