I have to get this down now, before it changes. In the Denver Post, by Terry Frei:
The Tampa Bay Lightning, the reigning Stanley Cup champion, will be watched closely because it decided to concentrate so much of its cap space on three forwards – Vinny Lecavalier, Martin St. Louis, and Brad Richards.
Reigning champs? This is stupid, and wrong, obviously. This should not have gone on the internet, because Terry Frei has editors who should catch this sort of thing. Also, Frei writes about hockey for ESPN.com, so this isn’t his first barbecue. The bigger laughing stock is the state of our “two” (really two from one office) newspaper town. Laughable.
But, as luck would have it, it was brought to my attention by Pleasure Motors at Covered In Oil, who had this to say:
I’ve always assumed, due to the unfailing ability for Colorado to be a decently dominant team for the entirety of their existence, that the city of Colorado somehow deserved it, that it was a decent-sized American market that thoroughly supported its team, and not just a success-happy bandwagon city that had a Stanley Cup tossed into its lap and has been living in the afterglow.
City of Colorado? For those who don’t know, Denver is a city, Colorado is a state. That would be like me calling Alberta a township after asking what current Prime Minister Paul Martin is doing these days (and for those of you in America, do some research on why that works). Don’t get me wrong. I like Covered In Oil. Some of the posts about Markkanen during the Cup finals were hilarious, and was and is a daily read. It’s a great blog, with excellent writing. And hey, all make mistakes. But that was perfect.
The thought for the day. You can rip me for being wrong. And that will happen, probably quite often. I don’t have an editor. Hell, my spelling and grammar are often atrocious. You can rip the beat writers for being wrong, and you should. They have editors who should catch these things, and they have more tools at their disposal than the rest of us (but the internet sure helps to close that gap). Oh, yeah, and they get paid to do it. But we are the fans, the ones who read the Avs articles in the papers, not the ones who write them. Don’t worry about us, we know the truth. Now, bring on the hockey.
(P.S.: If either of these errors are corrected by the time you read this, I guess you just have to trust me. I couldn’t make this up. But I hope the errors stand. Life is better that way)