A journalist, a star player and the broken media dynamic

Scott Burnside
Scott Burnside
A journalist, a star player and the broken media dynamic

There was a time when a veteran reporter like Jim Matheson in Edmonton, a member of the media arm of the Hockey Hall of Fame I might add, would have walked into the Edmonton Oilers locker room on an off day and maybe waited until the television cameras moved on, and sat down next to Leon Draisaitl and asked him about the many problems afflicting the slumping Edmonton Oilers.

Maybe Matheson, whom I have known and respected as a true pro since I got in this business almost 25 years ago, would have asked the same questions he asked Tuesday. Questions that were recorded in our new Zoom life and immediately digested, debated and digested and debated some more by folks on social media, the vast majority of whom have never had occasion to speak to a pro athlete, let alone ask one of the best players in the world why his team sucks.

That’s not an indictment of the commentary necessarily. Hey, it’s social media. Have at it, although it always infuriates me when other ‘journalists’ weigh in on these kinds of situations in what I can only assume is an effort to curry favor with their social media tribe. Don’t you have anything better to do? But I digress.

More than highlight the manner in which the Edmonton Oilers’ season has gone down the rabbit hole, Tuesday’s awkward interchange reinforces the great disconnect that has been created and exacerbated in these pandemic times between the player, coaches and executives of NHL teams and the reporters whose job it is to try and share the stories, good and bad, with the fans who are the lifeblood of the game.

When I started in sports after a long stint as a news reporter, I’m pretty sure I’d never spoken to an NHL player or ventured into an NHL locker room. I recall the early moments in that milieu in Detroit, trying to find the right words to ask future Hall of Famer Larry Murphy about coming to the Red Wings after becoming a whipping boy for Toronto fans.

I’m certainly glad that wasn’t a Zoom moment. I’m pretty sure it took time for Murphy to develop enough trust to talk about such a painful moment with any candor. But I’ll always remember when the Wings won the Cup in 1997, sitting down with the big defenseman in a mostly deserted Red Wing locker room, Murphy still in most of his sweat and champagne-soaked gear, to talk about what the moment meant to him. Does that conversation take place if he knows me only as a questioner from across the technology? Unlikely.

In that former time, when player and journalist actually spoke face to face, maybe Draisaitl would have taken issue with the questions Matheson asked. Maybe not. Maybe Draisaitl would have asked for a better question from Matheson, who might have asked for more elaboration on an answer from Draisaitl, and who knows what the end story might have been. Maybe they’d have both walked away dissatisfied with the moment. Although it’s guaranteed it would have been better than the prickly interplay between the two that became for a few moments at least a social media flashpoint.

It’s a clip that really should be reviewed by every member of the NHL’s communications staff and every communications staffer with the NHL’s 32 teams. Because at some point, this pandemic is going to end. In fact, the NHL announced Tuesday they are relaxing of testing protocols, surely a sign we are headed that way. So it is going to end someday. The league and its teams will have to decide what the new frontier vis a vis media relations and media access is going to look like.

Does the league want it to look like this?

Is this kind of detached sniping really something that a professional sports league and its teams should aspire to?

Or should the league aspire to creating an environment where players and the media share a workplace that includes being able to have conversations, a place where maybe it’s possible to find a comfort zone that perhaps leads to more meaningful stories being told?

It’s not hard.

When it’s safe to open the doors to your locker room and/or interview rooms, do it.

There will be conflict. It’s inevitable. It’s a competitive game that’s played by, coached and managed by competitive people. The journalism community is in its own way competitive as well. People will get mad at things that are said and written and they’ll get mad about things they are asked.

But it is inevitable those moments will come and go much more quickly in a landscape where the principals can talk to each other and air their beefs as opposed to what has transpired the last couple of years.

There are some backwards NHL executives who believe that limiting this kind of in-person contact is somehow protecting their players and coaches and managers.

Protecting them from what? Meaningful discussion? Protecting them from hard questions that might turn out to be actually easier to respond to in a more familiar, less antiseptic surrounding?

When I see something like the Matheson/Draisaitl exchange, I think of the last weeks of the 2017-18  season when I worked for the Dallas Stars.

The Stars had collapsed out of the playoff picture. We were in Minnesota after another loss. I sat down next to Tyler Seguin and began an elaborate, meandering question about the losing and what it meant. He was tired, sweaty and unhappy and he looked at me and basically said, I have no idea what you want me to say. He pointed out that I may have actually answered my own question in the question, which is entirely possible.

I’m glad I didn’t ask it via Zoom or I’d be the subject of a referendum on my own value as a journalist played out over social media. Pretty sure how the final voting would have come down.

Later Seguin stopped by my seat on the team charter and apologized for how our conversation unfolded. I told him there was no need to apologize and if there was an apology to be offered, it should have been mine. I needed to have asked the question better.

It was the truth.

I remember during that losing streak, puzzling over how I was going to frame my questions for head coach Ken Hitchcock, captain Jamie Benn or the team’s other players.

Part of the job is to try and explain for those who are reading or listening why certain things are happening. And the reality of asking those hard questions is that sometimes there aren’t really any answers. Doesn’t mean you don’t ask anyway.

The ‘everything’ that Draisaitl refers to in one of Matheson’s questions about what ails the Oilers may in fact be correct. But it’s also fair to ask if he’d like to elaborate.

Here’s hoping we get to a point where Matheson and Draisaitl can share the Oiler locker room and perhaps look back on Tuesday’s exchange and maybe have a laugh. Or still be a little bit pissed off. But 100 percent guaranteed that conversation will be a lot more agreeable to both of these professionals than what happened Tuesday.

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