Cheers and Jeers – Vol. 5

The Good and the Bad of this past week.

It’s Friday. We close out the Week That Was with our latest volume of Cheers and Jeers.

We start this week with a humble cheers to the local boys who won the Cup and brought it home this past weekend.

CHEERS to Milan Lucic, Cam Neely and Mark Recchi for celebrating their day with the Stanley Cup in BC. All three are incredibly deserving winners. My particular favourite is Cam Neely because he celebrated his Cup victory in his hometown, which also happens to be MY hometown, in the rink named in his honour. Take a look here at the video from Dan Rosen from NHL.com who has been following the Cup on its celebration journey with the Boston Bruins.

JEERS to the New York Islanders for their plans to host a viewing party for the re-broadcast of the Islanders/Penguins brawlfest game from earlier this year (Feb 11, 2011). It is infantile to be celebrating the behaviour and activities that occured that night, all which led to suspensions and other discipline. That said, it appears now as though the Islanders have thoughtfully buckled to outside pressure and MSG Network will now show a DIFFERENT game during the same scheduled viewing party, at the request of the Islanders (all this according to ESPN New York). I am not going to relinquish my aforementioned JEERS to the Islanders, because it was a ridiculously stupid idea to host a viewing party showing this game in the first place. In case you aren’t aware of what happened in the game, go see the Recap at NHL.com.

JEERS to ESPN Boston for repurposing a translation from your favourite Canucks blog (that would be Canucks Army in case you forget who you were reading) on an article about Luongo’s contrition about his comments on Tim Thomas during the Stanley Cup Final. ESPN Boston ran the story with our translation (courtesy of Stuart St-Amant) without crediting Canucks Army for the translated post, or Stuart for his translation. They only mentioned the original French language article from Radio-Canada.ca but didn’t even link to the interview. When called out on it publicly, James Murphy sputtered Toronto Sun quality excuses before DMing my colleague to say it’s "ESPN Protocol" not to link to outside sources. All around a poor demonstration of integrity by ESPN Boston and their lead writer.

CHEERS to both Yahoo’s Puck Daddy and NESN among others for posting articles on the exact same story but CORRECTLY ATTRIBUTING the translation of the French article to Canucks Army. NESN gets a special cheers and sticktap for calling us a "popular Canucks blog" and also following CanucksArmy on Twitter.

JEERS to the Toronto Star for the shameless reporting debacle following the sudden death of former Canucks forward Rick Rypien. The Star erroneously quoted Mike Gillis as calling the late Rypien as "crazy". How, you ask, did they erroneously quote Gillis in such a tactless way? THEY TOOK INFORMATION FROM RYPIEN’S WIKIPEDIA PAGE. How on Earth does a "legitimate" newspaper like the Toronto Sun let that happen? First of all, they used Wikipedia as a news source. That’s awful in and of itself. But didn’t they check the quote? Are they stupid? Or just lazy? Either answer is correct and reaks of infantile reporting. The Star issued an apology to Gillis and the Canucks, but there’s just no apologizing for that level of irresponsibility.

And finally, a melancholy CHEERS to all the Rick Rypien fans out there. The memorial at Rogers Arena shows how much you really cared for #37 and how much his on-ice passion and willingness to put his body on the line for his teammates really meant to you. Despite his troubled life, the last few days have shown how many people loved the guy. It’s just a shame that we wasn’t able to see this outpouring of emotion in his honour before he passed away.

Much like Luc Bourdon just three short years ago, Rick Rypien may be gone, but he will not be forgotten.

Photograph by: Andy Clark, REUTERS