The NHL has some great news for hockey fans!
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Sure, the lockout wears on, Bill Daly is saying all kinds of apocalyptic things about how the league lost $100 million by canceling the preseason, and we’re about two days away from actual regular-season games being canceled.
But there is a silver lining!
Yes, even despite all the fretting over the lack of hockey and guys already picking up fairly major injuries overseas, at least the NHL is winning over fans via social media sites for 14-year-old girls.
Of course, I don’t have a million fans on Pinterest, likes on Facebook or followers on Twitter (and I’d be positively insufferable if I did, for sure), but if this is the NHL’s idea of trying to make itself more attractive and likable for fans who may or may not be disenfranchised by the whole lockout thing, well, it’s the “Dennis Wideman Shootout Attempt” of PR moves. Last time out, yeah, the NHL probably had the majority of backing among fans, and could have, if social media really existed on the scale it does today, probably gotten away with this kind of thing.
But the fact is that the NHL is no longer currying favor by crying poor over a lockout it decided upon, and fans are quite frankly getting fed up with the rhetoric, especially given reports that talks have actually taken a step back from where they were prior to the last few days.
“The big deal,” to use the league’s parlance, is that it remains as tone-deaf as everyone makes it out to be, not that anyone is even remotely surprised to learn that. When you’re actively denying fans their ability to watch the sport they love, you don’t then also go out and say, “Yes well here’s what we’re up to on Pinterest, and how are you doing about that?” In fact, you try to keep the self-aggrandizing garbage down to what most would agree is a respectful minimum until you deliver hockey to every fan’s televisions and local rinks once again.
Now, to be fair to the NHL, it should be noted that it’s unclear exactly how many users were Pinterested in their garbage before all this. If there’s any justice in the world at all, that number is steadily falling. At this point, there isn’t language strong enough to tell the league where to go and what to do with its Pinterest page when it gets there.
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