I only say that because he put “NBC page” in quotes not brackets.
Maybe we are both reading way into it too much.
Maybe we both need hockey season to start.
Maybe I need to go to bed.
Maybe I need to stop saying maybe.
Maybe.

If he’s moving on to the Capitals, I vote we help him pack his shit up out of his mom’s basement, give him gas money (you know…the “now I gotta turn my back on ya” moment), and wish him well in Washington.

Please make this happen.

Cox, Dowbiggin, and Simmons for Japers and Ovechkin or Backstrom.

Do it.

I think this is all a trick to get bloggers to speculate on the identities of the players

You might be more right then you think. I wouldn’t put it past him.

I also think it’s pointless to speculate on their identities since Cox is such a dope and he’s speaking so ambiguusly while trying so hard to sound like he has inside knowledge that it makes me think he himself is probably fuzzy on the details or has been misled and only got them half-correct.

For example, it could be that one of the players is still with the team (oops) or that the helicopter group was never “caught”, just simply Wilson “learned of it”. “Caught” implies that they were explicitly forewarned not to do so and then actively prevented from doing it. I doubt that was the case.

Was it mild disapproval over a player’s juvenile attitude, or extreme friction caused by unnacceptable, deceitful behaviour that was harmful to the team? Who cares. We’ll never know, and we don’t even know WHO or WHAT we’re talking about. Lame.

I think you’re on the nose about this. Innuendo isn’t rumor mongering. He’s not saying WHO did WHAT, but he’s implying he knows what it was. So he has the benefit of being both an insider, and a gossip, while still holding onto his so called “integrity”.

Where’s the button for pseudo-rec? I gave it the real kind out of sheer lack of alternative.

We can say that he copied it off of PPP again.

I agree. The whole point of the modern column was to separate it from the more fact-based level of hard news reporting and provide an arena for personality, speculation and, allegedly, entertainment. Columnists were basically proto-bloggers, digging up and occasionally, as a favor to a source, planting rumors (for those interested in this stuff, The Sweet Smell of Success, about mega-columnist Walter Winchell is a fantastic movie). So it’s absurd that columnists are calling out bloggers for basically doing the same thing. Anyway, I realize this isn’t a blog about the evolution of journalistic ethics so, uhh, gotta like that Greg McKegg, right?

Well, in the broadest possible sense, I feel pretty strongly that anonymity+the Internet leads to some pretty crummy journalism and, on occasion, really awful behavior (obviously not in the case of the aforementioned hockey bloggers). This isn’t to suggest that the genuinely bylined reporters, e.g. Coxbiggin, aren’t constantly rewriting their own “code” of journalistic ethics, but simply because bylined guys can be unethical jerks doesn’t mean that bylines don’t matter. Maybe it’s a little naive, but I do hold on to the real name=a bit more accountability idea… (My real name is Jonny Diamond, btw.)

Now that my name’s on here, I really have to go back to work.

I have my doubt’s but I’m rec that for funny future NN outlook.