I don't want to make a big deal about this, but I am a little confused by the recent words of Adrian Dater. Let's go back to that famous paragaph from Thursday night:
I won’t mention any names, but I saw a couple of Avs players after this one standing in the halls, laughing and telling jokes with friends. Meanwhile, I saw Ben Guite still sitting in his uniform well after the game, staring off into the room.
The picture I get with this team finally - the one of 2008-09 - is that some guys cared and some didn’t. Make no mistake, the guys who didn’t care will be gone soon.
I talked about that on Friday, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. Clearly, folks are curious to learn the identities of these cads. But Dater is not going to give them up. He has rules.
But I’ve always pretty much told the many Avalanche players I’ve covered over the years the same thing: If I see you do something at a bar or at the hotel or we happen to bump into each other coming out of Shotgun Willie’s at 2 in the morning and I see you chumming around with a lady friend who may or may not be your wife, I don’t care. I just don’t.
Otherwise, I could see a player walking arm in arm with a transvestite back to the hotel at 2 in the morning, and I’m not going to care about it. It’s their private life. I draw the line at that. Talking in the halls after a game is part of their private life, I think.
Okay, two things. One, do we REALLY need to associate the Avalanche with transvestites again? But more importantly, I appreciate Dater's noble attempt to separate the players personal lives from their professional ones. There's nothing wrong with that.
Except...
Roy smashed up Hartley’s office with his goalie stick, after being pulled briefly in a game, one in which the Avs won but Roy didn’t get credit for the victory. The Avs did a good job of keeping it quiet, but a few days later I got word of it and wrote about it.
Many of you will remember that infamous Roy story, and Dater mentioned it in his blog one year ago (in Blood Feud as well, IIRC). So, how come one incident is reportable and one isn't? If anything, I'd think it would be the other way around, since Dater didn't actually witness the Roy outburst, unlike the recent shenanigans.
Look, I honestly don't care who did it. Okay, that's not true - I am mildldy curious, but I think I can go to my grave without knowing the truth. But there are folks who follow the Avalanche who want to know and the excuse given for not naming names here is a tad thin. Actually, I think a better reason to preserve the anonymity is listed later on in today's article:
I’ve seen people laughing and joking at actual funerals before. Sometimes that’s how they deal with death and despair.
It probably is a bit unfair to out the players, because people do react differently to situations like that. We don't want to focus too much on what a player says after a loss, right?