Not a lot of people. Because hockey media is... in a word... chickenshit.
I am not being, like, needlessly mean or anything. The mere possibility of losing access or pissing off the Capitals PR people makes almost every single hockey writer in North America quiver with horror.
I have never met such a servile bunch of cowards, even in Russia.
I have never met such a servile bunch of cowards, even in Russia.
The Alex Ovechkin myth in North America is a very carefully engineered propaganda that wholly relies on cooperating media's glazing over Ovechkin's political activity. The fact that Capitals PR and Leonsis have achieved this in the United States is nothing short of terrifying.
Such is the hockey writers' insecurity, their fear of irrelevance, their utter dependance on the good graces of iron-fisted PR departments and owners who want to control the message, that this could happen in a country famous for its free press and rabble-rousing reporters. Sad.
This is how you neutralize free press in a free society. Focus on the part of it that is marginal and insecure and hammer them into submission by threats of denying access. Football, basketball, baseball writers aren't as myopically focused on pure sports. Hockey? Tunnel vision.
