The main issue I have with post game coverage is the general lack of personality conveyed by the majority of the league. The NHL has some of the classiest athletes and coaches in all of professional sports, but sometimes you just want to hear someone go off.
No canned responses about “working hard”, “winning the battles” and “needing to be men” (at this point, playing like children would be a welcome change). I would love it if there was a bit more colour in those interviews and players said what they were really thinking.
Stuff like this:
(Never forget)
NEW YORK ISLANDERS
Head Coach Jack Capuano – “Yeah, so… this doesn’t happen very often so I don’t really know what to say here. Something about hustle?”
Evgeni Nabokov – “I have a little post victory dance too, it’s called ‘stare in shock at the scoreboard until they force me to leave the ice’. The name isn’t catchy, but it doesn’t really come up much”.
John Tavares – “What? Seven goals? Pfft, bulls**t. What kind of a free-falling, desperate, down on their luck team lets us score seven goals in the third period. Wait, I get it now. They’re just after our draft position! Dammit! Even when we win, we lose!”
Michael Grabner – “And to think, I could have been a part of this bright future in Vancouver. I know being on the Islanders isn’t much better, but tonight? It is.”
Cal Clutterbuck – “This might be the only time in my career I lead a team to victory. I know I only scored one of the seven goals, but using Clutterbuck calculations that means I actually scored four of them… and got 49 hits”.
VANCOUVER CANUCKS
Head Coach John Tortorella – “You guys want goals AND defence? This isn’t a f***ing fantasy land. You can’t have both, I don’t care what Gillis keeps saying about the Ducks”.
Eddie Lack – “Something needs to be done, here. They are taking the feel good story of the loveable wacky backup and turning it into something dark. I don’t want to throw bottles around. I would prefer to juggle them. That would be an amazing clip on Sportsnet.”
Henrik Sedin – “At least tonight I can say ‘I think we played a couple of good periods’ and it won’t just be my usual generic spin. Two is a technically a couple”.
Alex Burrows – “If there was ever a night I was gonna get my goal, it was tonight. As if things couldn’t get any worse, now I got Chris Tanev giving me scoring tips”.
Chris Tanev – “All I told Burr is that the key to scoring goals is shooting the puck into the net without it hitting anyone so much that it changes the trajectory of the puck so drastically that it goes wide of the net. I showed him a diagram I made, but he just crumpled it up and threw it in the garbage. Well, he tried to, it went wide of the can”.
Ryan Kesler – “I don’t feel like talking tonight. I have to go circle the date of the NHL draft on every single calendar I own. Yeah, I still own calendars, what of it?”
Chris Higgins – “I don’t know what to say, I mean, things started out real good for us, we got all the right bounces and got some big goals, but I guess the real turning point was when we decided to play the 3rd period instead of just faking a bunch of stomach aches. My stomach always aches, but that’s probably just the 600 crunches I do between periods”.
Zack Kassian – “Do I have to come back after my suspension? I should’ve done something worse and gotten the rest of the season. That might be the only way I get legitimate comparisons to Bertuzzi in this city”.
Zac Dalpe – “Look, alright, t’s easy to be cynical after a game like this… so here is a poem I wrote in the third period called “The Opaque Abyss”. It’s terrible, but I had plenty of time to write it on the bench”.
Nicklas Jensen – “I’m just a good young player, making good young mistakes, and being a good young disappointment that will be chewed up and spit out by this system unless we get a good young new coach”.
Darren Archibald – (places sealed envelope to forehead) “Our winning streak, my scoring streak, and Eddie Lack” (opens envelope) … name three things that have snapped tonight”.
Kevin Bieksa – “If you are all looking for the thing that will make me want out of Vancouver, tonight doesn’t even come close. It can get much MUCH worse before I even start to think about beginning to commence waiving my NTC.”
Tom Sestito – “Dan Hamhuis got beaten outside more than a boxing hobo tonight. I’m the authority on that, and he would’ve lost his bindle for sure”.
Dan Hamhuis – “It was a rough game for me, you know. Nothing was working. I don’t know what was worse: my containment to the outside or my rebound control. Making the first save is easy, but when you don’t have defence there to clear out those reboun– ohhhhhh. now I get why the goalies here are always so pissed”.
Alex Edler – “I really let the people down tonight. I’m out there, trying to be No.1 in the “worst +/-” category and give these fans a first place finish in something at least, and I finished this game with a zero. I will try less next time”.
Jason Garrison – “I’ve been watching this team since I was a kid, so this hurts me to be a part of this. However I’ve been advising Torts on Canucks history, but I still don’t think he’s getting it”.
You can follow j.Bow on Twitter (@jBowmancouver). He also needs to be a man, but the stakes are much, much lower.
