Here's the deal. When the Wild aren't playing, and there is no vast conspiracy running through its lifespan in the blogs and chat rooms around the interwebz, I get bored. When I get bored, I crawl out of my safety zone and venture out into the world of blogs I don't normally read.
That's when I get myself in trouble.
Make the jump if you want to have some fun today.
Let me preface this post with this. Kukla's Korner is a great place to go for access to information for all 30 teams. It is a set up much like SBN was, with a blog for nearly every team in the league. The difference between the two (KK and SBN) is that SBN seems to have cherry picked some of the best blogs from across the web and put them all in one place. What this leads to is a powerhouse network of blogs, all with mostly professional posts with the occasional light hearted homer-esque post from time to time.
Kukla's Korner has its fair share of truly professional blogs, including everything from Paul Kukla himself. Then, there is the Red Wings blog, From Abel to Yzerman.
I don't often read Red Wings blogs because they tend to, as Puck Daddy's Greg Wyshynski would say, be part of the tinfoil hat wearing crowd. Despite the fact that the Wings are a perennial powerhouse team, constantly in contention for the Cup and every other award there is, the fans and bloggers still seem to think the entire NHL fanbase and the NHL itself is out to get them somehow.
The main poster at From Abel to Yzerman, IwoCPO, is truly the most homerific of all homerific bloggers I have ever read. Is there anything wrong with that? Nah, as long as the reader understands that and takes every word written there with that information in hand.
I stopped reading A2Y awhile back. I just could not handle the conspiracies, the ignorance of where and who the Red Wings are in relation to the rest of the league, and the constant whining about how the Wings got jobbed yet again. Your team got jobbed by a ref? Welcome to the NHL. There's jackets and everything.
Anyway. Today I was told by a friend to go read the two latest posts over at A2Y. I swallowed the inevitable vomit creeping into my mouth and headed over to see what could possibly have led for this request. Once I read them, I decided I needed to voice a couple concerns with the posts, so here we go.
From the first post, titled Instead Of Whining? Let's Make Some Sort Of Sick Contest Out Of It. First off, the title? Just, wow. What is the question mark for? I am not a grammatical master, hell there are probably enough spelling and grammar errors in this post to give any responder plenty of ammo against me. However, not every word in a title is capitalized. Only the important ones.
Back to the post.
If we were Pens fans, we’d be piling up the alibis, pointing to different injuries as to reasons why our guys can’t possibly be expected to win with any frequency.
But, thank Jebus, Santa and the patron saint of serial killers, we’re not fans of a one-trick team whose "captain" requests permission from his owner to wear powdered blue around the house.
Fair enough, I guess. A Red Wings blogger criticizing Penguins fans. Creative. But to call them a "one trick team" is something I don't understand, and is not specified in the post. Is IwoCPO suggesting they have just one player who is good enough to win a game? Because that is not the case. Is it in reference to how many Cups they have won? Nope, can't be that either. So... what is it? Please explain.
I also love that captain is in quotes, as if to suggest that Crosby is not a very good captain. Well done with the play on punctuation, there. Again, very creative. Despite the fact that if the Wings could get Crosby, IwoCPO would give his (her?) right arm to make it happen.
Moving on to the second post, titled Memo To Everyone Else: You Don't Want This Team In Your Lives.
My cherry picked quote from this post is:
Will they win the Cup each season? No. Injuries, officials and a league run by a commissioner with his tongue stuck to a stop sign are just too formidable of a combination to overcome every year.
But, hold on now. In this post you say that injuries are going to hold your team back from winning a Cup every year, but in the post right after it (the one referenced above), you claim that you will not whine about injuries nor use them as excuses, sorry, alibis.
I do enjoy the hedging of the bet in this post, though. That if the Wings don't win the Cup every year, it must be due to some confluence of events that prevented it from happening. It must either be that too many players were hurt (but they would not suggest that), the officials (get your tinfoil hats ready), or the Commissioner. It could not possibly be that another team was, you know, better than the Wings that year.
Noooo....
So, here we are. Nearing the end of my post. I am almost certain that anyone who made it this far is wondering what this has to do with the Minnesota Wild. To that I answer, absolutely nothing. Except for this. "Writers" like IwoCPO (see what I did there, with the quotes?) are the example NHL teams point to when they refuse to credential bloggers. Bloggers such as him (her?) serve as the antithesis of what most bloggers are, which is fans who have some semblance of objectivity.
It is also "writers" like these that lead to hatred of the Red Wings and their fan base. Whether it's fair or not to lump all Detroit fans in with IwoCPO, he (she?) is one of the more vocal folks, and attitudes or viewpoints like his aren't exactly conducive to planting seeds of goodwill. Not that he (she?) and every other Red Wings fan really care what other fan bases think of them, but they sure seem to complain a lot about it. Don't they?
Thank you IwoCPO, and From Abel to Yzerman for ensuring that NHL teams always have plenty of ammunition to use when denying credentials to bloggers who actually have some professionalism. We appreciate it.
-Buddha