Watching the NHL’s Stanley Cup Media Day today at the Prudential Center led me to a single conclusion: hockey interviews are boring as hell. It’s not exactly groundbreaking news, its fairly widely known that those in the hockey industry provide some of the most generic and cliched interviews in all of professional sports, but it’s never really bothered me.
Until this season.
Y2kcrazyjoker4 at en.wikipedia [CC-BY-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)%5D, from Wikimedia Commons
So who’s to blame here? In reality, the answer is probably everyone involved. Players and coaches aren’t exactly willing participants in most interviews, it’s a part of the job description that you can tell they aren’t overly fond of. But modern day journalists are as much to blame for the current state of things. Sure there are the good guys out there, like Greg Wyshynski, Elliot Friedman, and James Duthie, who are still writing engaging stuff and avoid asking questions that everyone already knows the answer to. But so much of the industry is stuck in the rut of producing the same cookie-cutter material, attending media availability just so they can get a specific quote for a story they’ve already written. There’s no originality, and people wonder why the print journalism industry is in trouble.
As I eluded to earlier, players and coaches certainly aren’t off the hook in this sorry situation either. For the most part it’s pretty obvious that they don’t enjoy being interviewed and they think a lot of the questions they are asked are idiotic (which in their defense, they usually are), but a little personality or an upbeat attitude would sure go a long way. Look at guys like Chris Pronger, Shane Doan, or Willie Mitchell, all three do interviews with smiles on their faces and make and effort to provide some original answers and get a laugh or two out of their audience in the process. I’m sure they don’t like speaking to the media any more than the guy sitting in the stall next to them, but at least they do their best to get through it and provide a palatable product for the fans.
As far as a solution to the problem, to be honest I don’t know that there’s one readily available. Players and coaches are wary for a reason, too often they get fined or blasted in the media for saying anything even remotely original or controversial, and the worst-case scenario is that they fire up their opponent with some comments made in a pregame media scrum. But it’s the job of the media to get the story no matter what the circumstances and it pains me to say that parts of the industry are failing in this area. The days of game summaries and box scores being enough to satisfy the avid hockey fan are long gone, the new generation of hockey journalists has to find a way to break through the serious and reserved exterior of today’s NHLer and provide fans with the funny, engaging, and personal stories that they’re looking for.
After all the game is for the fans, isn’t it?
I hate the pre-, during, and especially post-game interviews. Total waste of time. No offense to the journalists out there, but noting of any importance will every be said. Nor should there be. I watch the games to watch the actual game. What the players are doing, think, eating or whatever has no bearing on my enjoyment of the game.
Seeing a feature on them, if well done, is interesting and I’ll watch that, but I change the channel whenever one of the players or coaches are interviewed.
It is my experience that Canadian players who were highly touted from a young age are the most generic interviews of all. Read an interview by Jonathan Toews or John Tavares, you would not even know which one was doign the talking. Its not to insult them, its juat that guys like that are a product of their surroundings. These guys were getting media attention even when they were younger, and the coaches are obviously strict with them regarding what is and is not acceptable. compare guys like that to European players or many American players or Canadian players who were not highly touted at a young age- those are the guys where you can see more personality, relatively speaking.
John Tavares is my favorite hockey player- his intervews for the most part are very contriolled- so those moments where he lets his guard down and laughs and acts like the young man he is are that much more noticable (and treasured).
What do you want to hear from the players/coaches in a media scrum? Do you want to hear them talk about how lovely their dinner was the night before? Their political views? Admissions of childhood bullying? Those kinds of things are for features, there’s no time for that level of engagement at press conferences.
Good piece, though. I agree that these interviews are horrible. They really CAN’T change, though…there’s no time for decent questions and answers in that forum. I just don’t watch. I wait for the feature on my favourite players, etc. (still waiting for most of them, since ESPN doesn’t really care about hockey, and my favourite football players aren’t the ones who get arrested all the time)
I don’t expect ground breaking stuff, but something that shows a little personality or takes a little thought for the players to answer. It’s the same cookie cutter questions every game, if teams and media want the fans to continue watching they have to try and do something different.
Agreed. But what? How should they change to improve it? I say we drop the whole farce that we want to listen to some idiot tell us that they “need a few bounces to go their way,” or that they’re “grinding hard out there, and something good will happen,” and just leave them the hell alone. Write into their contracts that these stupid intrusions won’t exist for them if they agree to have a one-hour feature on them done every season. I bet a bunch of them take the option, and everyone will be better off.