Deadmarsh Blog - Removed?!?

Howdy! With the Stanley Cup playoffs in the history books, we enter the slowest time of the year for a hockey fan. Luckily, we have baseball to get us through these tough months... unless you are a Rockies fan, when this season will henceforth be known as The Time of Great Drinking. Sigh.

There will likely be very few articles in the Denver Post about the Avalanche in the upcoming months, which might make it easier for Grading Dater to keep up with them, but seeing as how we've already established the next few months will be some sort of vicious bender waiting for hockey to return, I wouldn't count on it. But anyway, on with the show...

When you're an assistant coach for a hockey team,
you give up your right to privacy. Read the constitution! 

Today's entry is a curiosity: a blog entry that no longer exists. The reasons WHY it no longer exists we can only speculate, but it very likely indicates that Dater has stepped over the line of journalistic integrity and ethics once again. Not long after writing a blog in which he flirted with shady journalism by essentially reporting what he was (apparently) told off-the-record about Deadmarsh and Lefebvre returning to the Avalanche coaching staff, Dater posted an article explaining that Adam Deadmarsh had, in fact, stepped down from his position "for personal reasons" and accepted another, behind-the-scenes position with the team (Dater ended up oh-for-two on his "Deadmarsh and Lefebvre set to return" prediction, as this blog indicates that Lefebvre has accepted a head coaching position for the Canadiens' AHL affiliate).

When somebody says that they are doing something for personal reasons, I think 99% of the population realizes that what they're saying is that they do not really want those reasons discussed publicly. That doesn't mean that those 99% of people aren't curious about it and won't gossip and speculate, but it's a pretty safe bet that those people aren't newspaper journalists with the power to completely ruin that person's wishes to remain private just by tapping a few buttons. Adrian Dater IS a newspaper journalist, and even on his blog he has a greater responsibility to the privacy of those he covers than you and I do when we're sitting at the bar discussing hockey rumors and stuff.

Three Post-Game Blogs from Dater!

Today, Grading Dater will look at three recent post-game All Things Avs blog entries, all by Adrian Dater. The Avalanche lost the the Coyotes last week 4-1, to the Stars 7-6 in OT, and to the Flames last night 2-1.

Starting with the Coyotes game, Dater's blog can be found here, and it starts with what I consider a very promising paragraph:

I know a few of you probably have come here to watch me take this team to the woodshed. Yeah, there will be a little of that, but really I didn’t think the Avs were all that bad today really. I saw a team that put 40 shots on net, hit a couple of posts and skated pretty hard I thought. So I feel it’s a little hard to sit here and bash the whole team tonight, despite yet another home loss.

I often get a weird, confused feeling when Dater and I agree about something hockey-related. There's a dizziness in my head and a numb feeling at the tips of my fingers; I feel like I can hear the footsteps of insects within the wall; bright lights seem particularly sharp and painful; and I typically spend the next fifteen or twenty minutes handling inanimate objects to test their solidity and form, searching for a glitch in the Matrix.

Actually, I just realized that this description sounds a lot like a hangover... perhaps Dater and I agreed because one of us was drunk? At any rate, there's a lot to like about this blog. Only a few days ago, I wrote that I would like to see a loss like this one receive a "games like this happen" reaction from the Post, and whaddaya know, here it is!

Local Reporter Surprised, Upset over Extremely Commonplace and Reasonable Event.

The Avalanche season opener is fast approaching, and the team has finalized its roster. This has led Adrian Dater to climb up onto his stump and declare that the Avalanche have made a "very...very, very bad decision" in sending Stefan Elliott to Lake Erie:

Stefan Elliott to the minors? Bad decision

In this All Things Avs blog post, Dater makes it abundantly clear that he thinks Stefan Elliott should have made the Avs' NHL roster and that the Avalanche front office is a bunch of nincompoops. He makes it equally clear that he would much rather sit around and gripe about the Avalanche with his fellow fans than to report on it like a... well, a reporter.

Elliott, pictured moments after the Avalanche began the plot to destroy his life.

Having predicted that Elliott would make the Avs roster ("take it to the bank"), Dater reacts with surprise here that he didn't, and takes his embarrassment out on the Avs mangement. Dater got caught in the same trap when he predicted that Vokoun would be the Avs next goalie... he makes a prediction, ends up being wrong about it, and then reacts (and reports) emotionally rather than objectively. An objective view of this situation reveals many very good reasons for Elliott to start the year in the AHL.

Dater took the same approach a couple days ago with the decision to send Tyson Barrie to the AHL... and just as he was then, he's just wrong, plain and simple. As good as these guys may have been, it's pretty clear they aren't going to break into the Avs' top four without an injury or two occurring, so why bury a talented young kid at the bottom of the NHL roster, rather than send him to the minors where he will get gobs of ice time playing against men instead of boys, and–just maybe–learn a thing or two?