It feels like every couple of days we are graced with the publishing of another out-of-touch sports article from a member of the old guard of Toronto’s sports media.
At this point, the lack of quality insight emanating from the sports pages of Toronto’s once-relevant newspapers comes as no surprise: it seems as though many veteran sportswriters in this town long abandoned trying to keep up with the rapidly-changing game of hockey. Instead, they have lingered well past their prime, unchallenged by their editors, skating by on name recognition from a readership that is 80% people who found the sports page on a vacant bus seat.
They use plus/minus as a measure of defensive skill, over-focus on intangibles, and assume the role of expert body language analysts. They ask boring, unimaginative questions in scrums then get outraged about the boring, unimaginative answers they receive. They use reductive terms like “nerds” and “geeks” to describe an analytics community whose concepts they cannot, or care not to, grasp. They stick around for the access, the camaraderie in the press box, and the after-game whiskies as they file low-effort, uninsightful columns that do nothing to elevate the reader’s understanding of the game.
Occupying one of the spots on the Mount Rushmore o …
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Author: Mark Norman / The Leafs Nation