Habs Week in Review
Well at least we aren’t talking about how horrible the Habs are right now.
No, instead, we’re in the middle of a firestorm surrounding Alex Kovalev, La Presse and Le Journal de Montreal.
He said, she said. This is what it’s come down to. That, and how each media outlet is either attacking the story or defending it.
Alex Kovalev is reported to have said, to a Russian news agency that (and I am paraphrasing) that Carbo doesn’t like Russians, that the Habs are split into cliques based on nationality and that the younger players, most notably French Canadian players, ignore the veterans.
My first reaction? Ouin, pi ?
Am I the only one who doesn’t really see what the big deal is ?
The big deal, is that he said it. That a player ACTUALLY voiced his opinion on something and that it isn’t a canned sound bite fed out by the NHL, is the real source of this drama.
Watch now how the Habs PR machine goes into work. How it will spin this. How it will pull on their favorite journalists to dismiss this story. The Habs Organization is now into full damage control. In this media sports crazed city, an organization such as Les Canadiens needs a mechanism to control any and all damage. They have a very effective machine that does just this.
Deny, deny, deny and rally around each other.
One must understand that sports journalism is about one notch above automotive journalists. There isn’t much hard nosed journalism going on. The stats are prepared for them, the players are made available for them for interview (or not, depending on what the journalist had previously written about the team) and generally the story writes itself. There isn’t a lot of free thinking going on in the sport department.
But now, we have a player who has actually voiced his opinion on something and it’s as if he’d shot someone. The journalists now have something to write about.. but many are simply dismissing the story for fears of not getting to review the lastest Ford.. er, I mean to get to talk to Koivu after the match.
What will this do to Habs hockey? I think it will improve it. Kovelav now has to play. This is something that can rally players around one another and actually prove something..
If it doesn’t, the Habs are doomed.
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