Jacob de la Rose swapped teams this week, plucked off the waiver wire by the Detroit Red Wings after the Montreal Canadiens left him exposed.
Chances are no one, other than Mrs. De la Rose, paid much attention to this snippet of news.
Why then, one must be wondering, am I even mentioning this?
Perhaps because it reminds me of the time I had a couple of brief chats with de la Rose when he was a Canadiens farmhand in St. John’s.
I’ve had better, deeper conversations with a kettle. de la Rose wasn’t mean or nasty or anything. Uninterested, he just preferred to have a toe cut off than talk to the media.
Or maybe it was just me.
I’ve often found it ironic that de la Rose, he of the eight goals in 119 NHL games, and Dustin Tokarski, the netminder whose claim to NHL fame was a brief playoff fling with the Canadiens in 2015, cringed talking to the St. John’s media yet — at the risk of sound like a name-dropper — Montreal legends Guy Lafleur and Ken Dryden have been pleasant, accommodating and downright friendly the handful of times we’ve met.
I suppose this is another example of how pro sports and the media have changed over the years. Everything is corporate now, including the athletes.
Reporters, coaches and players could at one time have a gab, with a mutual understanding of what was for the record, and what wasn’t.
Now, the lack of trust — and some would say outright disdain for each other — is more palpable than ever before.
It’s why Dustin Byfuglien is rarely seen in the Winnipeg media. His contempt for the fifth estate is well known. Blake Wheeler only talks because, as the Jets’ captain, he has to.
It’s also why most reporters prefer covering the CFL, college or amateur sports. And here in St. John’s, the Edge and ECHL Growlers basketball and hockey teams.
Those athletes actually want to talk and tell their story.
Maybe it’s the big league teams themselves which are to blame, their gaggle of communications people existing, I’m convinced, to impede reporters rather than assist them.
In today’s world, with NHL teams employing their own website “insiders”, there’s no longer a need to rely solely on the media to deliver the message.
I’m not sure what’s ahead for the media, and objective reporting, analysis and opinion. Truth be told, teams and athletes could care less as social media and the “insiders” provide an avenue to share their story, and exactly the way they want it.
IN SHORT
There are eight players from Newfoundland and Labrador in the ECHL, six of them on the Growlers. In addition to James Melindy, Zach O’Brien, Marcus Power, Scott Trask and the injured Adam Pardy on the local team, Rodi Short was added to the roster this week. The other two Newfoundlanders are Cody Donaghey in Orlando, and Evan Fitzpatrick, who now lives in Nova Scotia, with the Tulas Oilers … While Short’s addition was to beef up a blueline that’s thinning because of injury, it’s probably not a wise thing to dip into the Newfoundland senior hockey ranks too often (Short has been a mainstay with the Grand Falls Cataracts the past number of years) as it only fuels a belief — silly as it is — that the ECHL is merely a glorified version of senior hockey … The Memorial Sea-Hawks men’s basketball team lost its top two scorers — Daniel Gordon and Davion Parnsalu — from last year’s 5-15 team to graduation. Now we see Greg Manuel and Austin Chambers are no longer on the roster. Manuel, a starter in the playoffs last year and the Sea-Hawks’ fourth-leading scorer with 9.4 points per game, was going into his fourth year, and Chambers his fifth. The Sea-Hawks currently have 11 players on the roster, eight of them Newfoundlanders …
Robin Short is The Telegram’s Sports Editor. He can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @TelyRobinShort
