Big Brother:

A.k.a. Don’t read just the titles…

Sometimes we read the papers or watch our favourite TV sport show and hear a player make a comment. Sometimes we are shocked by the comment itself. We then usually hear from the players that they were misquoted. More often than not, they aren’t. They said exactly what is reported. But unfortunately, we rarely hear the reason they made those comments and how they are taken out of context. Let me demonstrate.

On Tuesday Bob Gainey sent his star player back home to take some rest. That is a fact. What most journalist talked about is how Bob Gainey said “The team doesn’t need Kovalev the way he plays right now”. That’s right, he said it. And it was a bomb in itself. Of course, he said that to wake up his player, kick him in the ass so to speak.

No. He didn’t. Over the course of a long media session where Gainey first said he sent Kovalev home because he was tired and was putting his emotions in the wrong places, the Montreal media tried many times to make Bob say that it was a huge risk. They wanted his to say that his team, without one of his best players, was doomed to lose. At one point after the third question looking like “what are the chances of winning without Kovalev in the lineup” Gainey finally said that the team doesn’t need him the way he’s playing right now.

See the difference here? Now he’s not answering a question about why Alex is at home watching RDS and hearing about those comments, he answering about the chance of his team to win. What do you expect him to say here? “Oh yeah! We’re f%?&ed. We have absolutely no chance to win. I think we’ll just save the money from plane tickets and not even show up. I really hope our players don’t lose too much energy over those two games.” Of course he can’t. He has to say he is confident that he team will prevail. Even if in his mind, he’s thinking that he might be throwing away two games to try to save the season, he still can’t say that. But at no point did he say Kovalev was sent home because the team didn’t need him, that’s just the way the Montreal media forgot how they got a quote in the first place.

And then, there is the idea that Kovalev would have said to some Russian newspaper that he didn’t expect to play for the Canadiens ever again, that he would refuse to play in Montreal next year and that the problem of the team is because the young players are partying too much and of course because of the coaches. Now, I know Kovy can have some solid brain cramps on the ice but he’s been in Montreal long enough to know that nothing he’ll say to any journalist around the world will not be heard in Montreal. Do I really believe he would have slammed the organization that much? He could have had a slip of the tongue and say he wasn’t as convinced he’d finish his career in Montreal like he said he would in the past but to go that far on pretty much every front? Give the man at least enough credit to know how bad that would have been for his career.

Then, there is always the problem that sport journalist in Montreal don’t always care about the truth. It is so easy to say anything about anybody and get away with it instead of having something meaningful to write. So when La Presse said that Bob Gainey was shopping Kovalev for two weeks already, I knew that was the type of comment that could never be verified, that will be denied true or false and was mainly designed to fill up space. Then we hear from multiple sources, from Montreal and around Canada, that General Managers actually called Gainey to enquire about the possibility of acquiring L’Artiste and all were answered that he wasn’t available. Obviously someone lied here and if you ask me, I’ll trust Bob McKenzie from TSN over every journalist in Montreal.

And that of course brings us to the Main Story for the next couple of days. How the Kostitsyn brothers and Hamerlik have ties with a criminal and was originally presented as having possible criminal repercussions. Read the articles. Read how the police, during their investigations, taped hours and hours of conversations and discovered that Pasquale Mangiola, the criminal in question, is a big hockey fan and talked to them at least three times a week about the Canadiens and their own plays. He helped them get flashy cars, took them out to drink, got them girls… the whole works. But the police also said that none of those players are under any investigations and none of them did anything criminal.

Was it stupid from two Russians to let a mobster help you buy Vodka and get cars and girls for them? You bet your ass it was. But we still aren’t talking about criminal repercussions or even criminal links. The kids got cool stuff in exchange from a couple of hours on the phone and, I’m sure, some Bell Centre tickets and autographed jerseys. Mangiola got to surround hockey players, talk to them and have fun with them in exchange for legal stuff that was probably a lot easier to get than what he usually did for criminal organization, which was the original investigation. In the middle of it, the police just learned that the guy liked hockey and was renting cars for some players. That’s not a crime, that’s barely a fun fact…

So in the end, let me repeat myself a second. Yes, what you read in the papers, especially in big titles, is most of the time true to some extent. But it is so easy, fun and pretty much the norm in Montreal to take it out of context and inflate everything out of proportion if it can make the story juicier.

Just don’t stop at the title. Read more and don’t trust most of the Montreal media.