Odds and Ends

Hello! Here are a few brief (we can only hope) grades for some recent work found on the Denver Post. Enjoy!

Deadmarsh, Lefebvre looking set to return

Few people remember what
great, great hair this guy had

In this blog, Adrian Dater uses some very odd logic to explain why he believes that Avalanche assistant coaches Adam Deadmarsh and Sylvain Lefebvre will be with the team next season. He begins by explaining that the Avalanche do not allow their assistants to speak to the press, nor do they announce any upcoming coaching changes. "For instance, if an assistant coach is not coming back, they will not release that information publicly." With him so far? He then tells us that when he asked somebody (he doesn't say whom) about Deader and Lefebvre, he was met with silence. His conclusion from that is, oddly enough, that they are coming back... despite the fact that he just wrote that when the Avs say nothing, it usually means a coach isn't coming back.

Confused? You're not the only one. When a few commenters questioned this very issue and raised a couple very good points about it, the response was the tired-out "It's a blog, he can write whatever he wants." Even Dater (or somebody using his name, anyway) himself chimed in, writing "I just love getting lectures on "accountability" from people who don't use their real name." Well, even though a blog can be used to inject some more opinion into things than would be proper in a regular article, a blog is not an excuse for amateurish journalism from a professional journalist, whether he uses his real name or not.

Hello Again!

Hello there! It's been quite a while since I last added anything to Grading Dater (and before that, it was quite a while too), and there are a few reasons for that which I am sure you are just dying to hear. A number of fairly large life changes have been happening lately, and while these changes have been overwhelmingly positive, they've diverted my attention away from the blog. It happens, sorry! Also, even when I was full-steam on keeping up with the blog, I wasn't getting a lot of feedback, and after a while it started to seem like I was just typing to myself, which got a bit frustrating. At least Dater gets plenty of feedback, and love or hate, he knows people are reading him... so if you're out there, make some comments! Whether it's "Keep it up" or "Your blog is the stupidest thing I've ever encountered," I'd love to hear from you. And third, the Avalanche coverage lately -- as I mentioned in a number of previous entries -- has improved, thus giving me less to write about... and seeing as how the goal of this blog is to improve the media coverage of the Avalanche, this is a good thing, right?!

All Things Avs blog: Dater wants to see emotion out there, damnit!

http://blogs.denverpost.com/avs/2011/03/31/postgame-avs-predators-an-all-too-typical-performance-of-late/6819/

In this blog entry, Adrian Dater offers his thoughts after another Avs loss, this one to the playoff-bound Nashville Predators. Dater mentions that Erik Johnson was upset after the game, and then states that he believes that the team needs a lot more angry guys playing angrily.

While I think it's great that Johnson was pissed off after the game, Dater doesn't seem to realize that not everybody is like that. There was a movie a few years ago, a chick flick disguised as a baseball movie, which worked in that it tricked me into watching nearly the entire thing (it had Drew Barrymore in it, for chrissake, but it still managed to get me). It wasn't bad, but I can't remember the name. Fever Pitch, maybe? Anyway, this Red Sox fan was living and dying with the team, like they do, and after a particularly tough BoSox loss they guy was just heartbroken, fuming and furious. And what did he see that night? Three members of the Red Sox, eating dinner after the game, laughing and having a good time as if the loss was no big deal at all.

The fan was upset and pretty much offended at this, but eventually it led to a bit of an epiphany for the guy about priorities, and he ended up running out onto the field in the middle of a game to give Drew a grope in front of everybody before Pedro told them to get a room. I can't really remember how it ended, to be honest, so I just made that last bit up, but it's probably a pretty safe bet.

Ranting Homer? Yeah, that sums it up nicely.

Dater needs to learn this: it's the fan's job to get all emotional about this game. The players see it differently, because they're not fans... and it isn't Dater's place (or ours) to question their desire to win just based on their demeanor after the game. Dater here is writing like a fan, not a journalist... which is perhaps his biggest fault (among many).

Ironically, Dater steps into journalist mode long enough to call out Cody Mcleod for taking a stupid penalty that hurt his team. The irony there, of course, is that McLeod's angry, hit-anything-that-moves attitude on the ice is pretty much exactly what Dater just said the team "needs A LOT more of." Make up your mind, Dater... you want them playing angry and with plenty of emotion, but when they do, you criticize the inevitable result? Doesn't sound like a very clear line of thinking to me.

Dater goes on to criticize management for trading away Shattenkirk and Stewart in the trade that brought Erik Johnson to the Avs... but wait, isn't Johnson the very same player that not three paragraphs earlier, Dater said was bringing exactly the right attitude to the team? Oh, I'm so confused...

He goes on to touch on just about every hot topic he can think of: the Anderson trade (shock!), the coaching, the ownership, Jay McClement... since when is a 4th-line center at the heart of a team's problems? Dater has himself so twisted around here, it's rather funny.

Basically, this is just another of Dater's fuming, unfocused complaints about the team not having enough fire and focus out there. Blogs like this occur about once every three losses, and they rarely say anything that the previous 50 did not. It's another cliche-filled rant about anything and everything, designed just to entice readers to click on the blog, without any real attempt to report, educate, debate, or analyze.

Dater substitutes cliches for knowledge of the game... which is why we get so many of them. It's just a bit uncommon for him to shoot as many holes in the bottom of his boat in such a short time as he does in this blog entry.


D+

All Things Avs blog: Dater goes mental on officials for helping Jackets bully poor Forsberg

http://blogs.denverpost.com/avs/2011/02/11/postgame-avs-blue-jackets-foppa-and-the-not-ready-for-prime-time-players/6463/

This is Dater's postgame thoughts from the Avs/Blue Jackets game, which Columbus won 3-1. It is pretty standard Dater whining, sky-is-falling, these guys are pathetic/they have no heart stuff, until this point:

Referee Stephen Walkom didn’t dignify the proceedings tonight. I try to stay away from analyzing the referees, but they do a job just like any other guy out there and deserve to a look once in a while. Walkom let a few blatant calls go tonight, some involving Forsberg. Overrated, overpaid Sammi Pahlsson pulled his usual clutch and grab, hit’em-after-the-whistle routine once tonight on Forsberg, and old-school, time-has-passed-him-by Walkom just swallowed his whistle and let Forsberg get wrestled to the ground behind the play.

Guys like Walkom should do the hockey world a favor and retire, because he doesn’t know anything about today’s faster game and how to call it. He seems to want every game to go back to the clutch-and-grab disaster it was prior to the last lockout, and that ain’t the way it’s done any more Steve.

Better to take that league pension and go back to the backwaters of the sport you so clearly miss. Nobody else in the modern world does. But one of Walkom’s good ole Canadian boys, Rick Nash, got looked at crossways by American Paul Stastny in the second period tonight and Walkom blew his whistle and administered a slashing penalty – a slashing penalty, on a guy whose stick never actually touched Nash? Yessir, two minutes in the sin bin for Stats, while more rodeo hockey could ensue on guys like Forsberg without consequence.

So, first star tonight to Stephen Walkom, for giving us all a nice circa 1998 game out there. Well done, NHL marketers.

Where to start with this? Well, first of all, if you didn't see the game, it was actually called fairly even. The Jackets had two power plays, and the Avs had one. That's not saying it was called well, but it was called the same for both teams, and in hockey that's about as much as you can ask for. The Stastny call he mentions was not a great call considering the things that were not called, but neither was it as innocent as Dater makes it out to be. As in ANY hockey game, there were missed calls, but the officiating didn't figure into this game at all.

Dater seems to not have noticed that Forsberg pretty much grabbed Pahlsson by the back of the neck and pulled him to the ice; the way he remembers it, Forsberg was "wrestled to the ground behind the play." In fact, if this game had been called the way Dater apparently wants to see it called, Forsberg would have probably taken at least as many penalties as he drew... he played the same sort of game he always did, which frankly I was happy to see. Forsberg gives as good as he gets, and that apparently hasn't changed, floppy ankles and all.

Am I saying that criticisms of the officiating are improper in a newspaper setting? Not at all... but there is a professional way to go about it, and there's a rabid homer fanboy way to go about it. That Dater chose the latter is the issue here.

There was zero professionalism in this entry... it starts with a Dater standard: "I usually don't (blank), but..." and then he goes on to do exactly what he says he never does. If also featured Dater's typically snotty tone, a real journalism no-no. It included personal insults -- including, incredibly, a charge of xenophobia -- directed at Walkom (apparently Dater does not realize that there were two refs on the ice allowing Forsberg to get mugged, as Walkom gets 100% of his wrath here). He threw in an unnecessary sideswipe at Pahlsson, sarcastically gave the officiating the first star of the game, and he topped it off by donning his tinfoil helmet to assert that the NHL has put crooked officials in place, apparently in an effort to ensure that the league will thrive by allowing skilled, star players to be easily neutralized?

I mean, seriously... how cranky is Dater on this one? So the refs missed a couple calls. Did it really warrant 250 bile-filled words for a game between two second-division teams? But he really went for broke here, and I'm not sure why, because as I said earlier, the officiating had no bearing on this game. The difference here, I think, is that Saint Peter was on the ice, and therefore any and every missed call involving Forsberg is a Crime Against Hockey! Dater ultimately comes across here as the unabashed Forsberg fanboy he really is.

The rest of the entry reverts to the tone it started with: no-insight, cliche comments like "I question [Stastny's] fire to win," and "Where is the emotion out there?" Basically, this blog entry is an insight into nothing more than all the things Dater was cranky about before going to bed last night. I suppose there is a place for that in the blogosphere, but I fail to see how it fits in with professional newspaper coverage of the Colorado Avalanche.

Grade: F  This useless yet oddly entertaining blog entry includes a classic Dater rant, reminiscent of the anti-ESPN rant from a few years back. Too bad that he didn't put nearly as much thought into this as he did then... the ESPN rant was silly, but at least there was an actual argument in there somewhere if you took the time to peel away the junior-high taunts and name-calling. This is just frustration... if the team is frustrated, report it. I don't really care, however, if Dater is frustrated.