Washington Post Sports Watch #1: Swimming World Championships

In certain ways the coverage the Washington Post sports section gives D.C. sports fans (when you combine both what's available online with what's in the print edition) is better than ever. The blogs devoted to each of the professional teams gives readers much more information, and in a much more timely fashion, than we ever got a few years ago - before blogs, etc. And Dan Steinberg's D.C. Sports Bog is essential reading for any local sports fan--and if you don't know why, you're obviously aren't reading him. Yet, as the Post overall has deteriorated in recent years because of the Internet, staff cuts and bad management, the Sports section, especially the print edition, has had a similar downward trajectory in many ways--missing certain stories, running a number of boring or contentless columns by their supposedly superstar columnists, editing errors and a number of other strange decisions that I intend to regularly catalogue in this space. Today, though, I want to start by praising the Post for sending a reporter to Shanghai to cover the World Swimming Championships this week. I know some sports fans don't agree, but I love the Olympics and while I can't say I regularly follow swimming, track and field, etc. in Olympic off years, I do enjoy reading about (and occasionally watching on TV) the world championships in those sports every couple of years. I imagine that other than the New York Times and Sports Illustrated, there are hardly any other mainstream publications that sent anyone to China to cover this event.

So what's my problem? Actually, there are two. First is a problem that increasingly is an issue at the Post in general--the cuts in editors has led to paper just missing things that shouldn't be missed. The preview of the Swimming Championships today in the Post is the featured article on the front of the Sports section, with huge pictures and taking up most of the front page (on a morning when the Nats were on the West Coast and the only other sports news in the possible end of the NFL lockout, that's fine.) And yet neither in the "Sports on the Air" listings of TV sports broadcasts today nor anywhere or around the article on the World Swimming Championships is there any mention that the Swimming Worlds are actually being broadcast for two hours on NBC on Sunday? Why not? I have no idea--since the channel listings and times frequently accompany articles on other major sporting events in the Post. Does the person who edits the sports on TV listings not look at the TV grid in the Post's TV Week publcation, where it is listed? I hope not. Did NBC just not send out a press release that they were broadcasting this event? Perhaps, but I doubt it. I don't really no the reason, but it seems inexcusable to me--if you consider the World Swimming Championships important enough to send a reporter to China, you'd think someone, when putting together the piece, might have taken five minutes to say, "Hey, we sure this isn't on TV somewhere? Doesn't NBC cover this kind of thing a lot?"

The other thing that astonishes me about the Post's coverage of the World Swimming Championships is the fact that they sent a reporter all the way to China to cover this event and yet they couldn't send a reporter to cover ANY of the seven games in the Stanley Cup Finals (and three of those games were in Boston.) The Post has said before that part of their coverage decisions are based on TV ratings--well, trust me, even if the Post had promoted the NBC coverage of the World Championships today, they're still going to have a much smaller TV audience than the Stanley Cup Finals did. And considering Washington right now is a city where the hockey team is the second most popular team in the city, it seems odd that it would say it couldn't afford covering the championship of the NHL which took place in North America but could cover an event half a world away that lasts a week. Like I said, I'm fine with the Post wanting to cover the Swimming Worlds, I just don't understand how they can't cover any games in the Stanley Cup Finals.

I'll continue to cover these puzzling decisions in future blog posts.

Why Marc Thiessen doesn't seem to be a very good columnist (aka Hockey Fact Check #1)

There seems to be a lot of people upset that the Washington Post has hired former Bush speechwriter Marc A. Thiessen as a new weekly columnist, primarily because he's been a strong proponent of torture and has even written a book defending it (although if you read the comments bashing him below his first column, you'd think he'd personally waterboarded prisoners at Gitmo.)

Sure, I find it a little odd that after hiring former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson to write an op-ed column, the Post would a couple years later hire another former Bush speechwriter -- but if the guy has something interesting to say and a fresh way of saying it, why not? Unfortunately, I read his first column, which is about hockey -- something I know a lot more about than torture. And if it's a preview of what's to come, Thiessen won't be a very good columnist, because all he does is demonstrate that he has no idea what he's talking about when it comes to hockey.

Thiessen's argument in his column, "Don't expect miracles in Vancouver," is that it's too bad professional hockey players now participate in the Olympics, because we can never have a repeat of the 1980 "Miracle on Ice" team, where a U.S. team of college kids and other amateur players knocked off the greatest hockey team in the word from the Soviet Union. As he writes:

If Team USA defeats Russia in the Vancouver Olympics, Max and I will be cheering -- but I doubt a generation of children yet-to-be born will be celebrating the victory decades from now. The Miracle on Ice is considered one of the greatest moments in U.S. sports history not just because of the cold war backdrop, but because a bunch of college kids took on the greatest hockey team in the world and won. If the American squad had been made up of NHL players, it's unlikely that they would have inspired a blockbuster movie, or that we'd be marking the anniversary of their win.

That's a noble, good-hearted sentiment, but it completely ignores reality -- and history.

First of all, the Olympics now, as opposed to 30 years ago, doesn't require amateurism (or not earning money from your sport) in order to participate. All the top Olympic athletes in every sport are professionals. But even if the NHL decided it won't allow its players to participate in the Olympics, that wouldn't mean that we'd ever get a repeat of anything close to the "Miracle on Ice." Back in 1980, while the Western nations could only send amateurs, the Eastern bloc nations were somehow able to skirt those rules and send their best professional hockey players to the Olympics (I think they claimed, for instance, that their top team, the Soviet Red Army team, actually earned their money by working for the army or something--I never really undestood this, but somehow the Soviets got away with it.) But 30 years later, with no Iron Curtain, almost all the best Russian hockey players are now playing in the NHL. So if the NHL didn't send its players to the Olympics, you'd have a bunch of U.S. college kids competing against a bunch of Russian college kids, young players who haven't left for the NHL yet -- and maybe a few past-their-prime Russians now playing in the top Russian league, like a 40-year-old Sergei Fedorov. You think that would inspire a movie or an anniversary commemoration? Don't think so.

But more than that lack of knowledge of history or hockey, what annoyed me about Thiessen's piece was his line that "for the sake of hockey fans and for the sake of the NHL," the NHL should decide not to send its players to the next Olympics. Now there is a solid argument -- even if I don't agree with it -- for why the NHL should consider not sending NHL players to the Sochi, Russia Olympics in 2014. Thiessen doesn't even really make it.

He does mentions the risk of injuries -- which is of some concern but I think is somewhat blown out of proportion. At the most, it's six extra games, and of course there is the risk of injury. But there's a risk of injury in every game when the players return to the NHL, too. That's just sports. The actual good argument that the NHL has in its quiver is its concern that shutting down its league for two weeks during the stretch run of the season in February may not be worth it financially, considering the lack of benefit the league gets from it. The NHL originally agreed to shut down the season every four years for the Olympics because they hoped it would show off their most talented players to the much bigger television audience that the Olympics provides. But with the games either being broadcast live in the middle of the night (as in Nagano in 1998 and likely in 2014 in Sochi) or never being shown -- or on most nights even mentioned -- on the NBC prime-time broadcast but instead totally shunted off to NBC's sister networks like USA and CNBC like this year, they wonder whether they're getting any exposure except to diehard hockey fans. The disrespect from NBC has gotten even worse in the last two days--six out of the seven games played as I write this have been joined in progress in the first period either because curling went into overtime or CNBC was showing the last five minutes of a 13-0 women's hockey game. I actually think even with the indignities heaped upon the NHL, though, this Olympic tournament will help the NHL in the long run. The league hasn't had this many young, exciting stars in as long as I can remember, and a potential Russia-Canada meeting in the gold medal game would only pump up the Ovechkin-Crosby rivalry even more for what hopefully will be meeting this spring in the playoffs.

But even if the NHL doesn't get that much benefit from these games, I don't care -- because I'm a hockey fan. That's what makes me so angry about Thieseen's piece, that he claims that not sending NHL players to the Olympics is somehow the best thing for hockey fans. Thiessen is apparently not an actual hockey fan, because any true fan of the sport wants to see the best players in the world. And he's not going to be a very good columnist, because he doesn't even try to refute -- or even acknowledge -- his opponents' best argument.

Thiessen argues that the Olympics should be reserved for seeing up and coming stars in college and junior hockey, because that level of hockey doesn't get the exposure that college basketball and football get. Well, yeah, because hockey in the U.S. just isn't as popular a sport as football and basketball are. But if you want to see college and junior hockey, ESPNU and ESPN broadcast the Frozen Four and other games in the NCAA hockey tournament, and the NHL Network broadcast much of the World Junior Championships this past December and January. If Thiessen wants to see those tournaments, he now knows where to find them.

In the Olympics, why shouldn't we want to see great hockey? The Olympic hockey tournament is any hockey fan's dream -- Canada, Russia, Sweden, Finland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and the USA all with teams loaded with NHL stars playing not in some all-star game where no one cares who wins, but for an Olympic gold medal. It features great skating, skill and goaltending and intense games. Missing out on such games would be good for hockey fans? How exactly? People have been talking about this tournament for weeks--and have you seen how excited Canadian fans are for it?

Thiessen argues that NHL players wouldn't trade a Stanley Cup for Olympic gold. That may be true for most players, but it's not a clear-cut call in many cases. (In fact, Alex Ovechkin has repeatedly refused to say which is more important, saying he wants to win both, and saying only, "The Olympics is first, then the Stanley Cup.") This isn't like tennis, for instance in the Olympics, where any player would rather win Wimbledon than a gold medal. Hockey has a great tradition of international games. One of the most famous moments in Canadian sports history in Paul Henderson's goal with 34 seconds left to win the 1972 Summit Series for Canada over Russia. That led to the international Canada Cup tournaments in the 1970s and 1980s featuring professional players. And of course, being part of Team USA still is a huge thing for any American hockey player who lived through or even heard stories of the Miracle on Ice.

I'm going to watch the end of the USA-Norway game and get excited for the Russia-Slovakia game later tonight. I hope if Thiessen really is a hockey fan he'll be watching too. I can only hope that Thiessen decides to write about torture in his next column for the Post. He's got to know more about that than he does about hockey, right?

The Washington Post still doesn't cover hockey

For two Saturdays in a row, the Washington Post's "Free for All" letters section has carried missives complaining of the Washington Post's poor coverage of the Stanley Cup playoffs since the Washington Capitals were eliminated in the first round. It was quite fitting that a letter appeared this past Saturday, because that was the day that the Post's hockey coverage reached an unbelievable nadir that will likely be impossible to surpass. I picked up Saturday's sports section, and wasn't surprised that it didn't have the results from the Friday night Stars-Sharks game, since it didn't start until 10 p.m. and went into overtime. But I realized I had never seen the final score of Thursday night's Wings-Avalanche game four, and the Post did have a brief article and box score for the Wings-Avs under a headline that said "Thursday's game." Amazingly, although the last time I checked that game on Thursday night, it had been 7-1 Detroit, the Post had a summary and box score that had the Wings winning 4-3. What a crazy third period that must have been, huh? No, actually the final score of game four was listed in the agate type as 8-2. The Post, under the headline of "Thurday's game," had actually printed a few paragraphs and the box score from Tuesday's game three. Yes, the Washington Post printed the box score from a game that had occurred four days before.

Now I work at a newspaper, and I know that at deadline mistakes honest mistakes can be made (although you'd like to think there'd be someone who was following hockey enough in the Post newsroom to catch this one). But even if the mistake was just the case of hitting the wrong button on the computer, it sure is a fitting symbol of the Post's coverage of the NHL since the Capitals were eliminated from the playoffs. I wrote a blog post back in January about how while the Post does a good job of covering the Caps, the newspaper has essentially given up on covering the league as a whole. The outdoor game on New Year's Day, which got lots of coverage in just about every major sports outlet, got a photo and a few sentences in the Post. But after the Caps's great run at the end of the season, and the remarkable interest it generated, the Post has apparently judged that there will be no greater interest in hockey now than there was in last year's hockey postseason, when it also got no staff coverage.

In fact, I think this year the coverage is actually worse. At least three times in the past week or so, I leafed through the sports section looking for the hockey box scores and they were so buried I didn't even see them the first time through. One time they were nestled under the girls high school lacrosse results, and today the 10 sentences and box score on the clinching game in the Flyers-Habs series was so buried in the bottom right corner of the final page of the sports section that I had to point it out to my dad--who had assumed the Post just didn't print anything on the game.

One might think that with this year's Eastern Conference finals matching two teams that are probably, historically, the Caps' biggest rivals--the Penguins and Flyers--there might be some interest in Washington in the series. But don't expect any coverage beyond those wire service articles in the Post. According to a posting by Caps beat writer Tarik El-Bashir on his blog (in answer to a question I posted), the paper apparently needs to save its hockey budget to cover the draft and awards ceremony, and thus only if the finals "feature a big market matchup, or some other juicy storyline, my editors may decide to dig deep. But that's not my call."

I'm glad to hear that El-Bashir will be at the draft and awards ceremony, but amazed that the paper's sports section--which, judging from the attention it gives to events like the Olympics and the way some of its columnists opine more on national issues than local teams, obviously considers itself a player in the national scene-- is skipping the NHL playoffs. (They didn't even print previews of the second round series, after taking almost a whole page with a preview of the first round.) So why absolutely no interest in a national sports league that by all accounts (TV ratings, buzz, hugely increased interest in the local team, column on the NHL by ESPN Sports Guy Bill Simmons, even) is on an upswing? I have no idea. (Even the Washington Times had a staff-written article on Jaromir Jagr the other day. Hey, there's another local angle that's now gone.) But they're begging me to go elsewhere to read about the NHL playoffs. I guess I will.

More on this issue coming up in another post.

I know hockey isn't that popular, but this is ridiculous....

I hadn't realize how poorly the Washington Post covers hockey until I picked up the Post sports section this morning. After reading the coverage of the Caps' win yesterday, I looked for coverage of yesterday's outdoor hockey game in Buffalo and found...a photo. Okay, there was one paragraph and a box score, too, which mentioned that the game was outdoors and Sidney Crosby scored the winning shootout goal. And that was it. Nothing on the atmosphere of the game, how the weather affected the players, etc. I thought the game, though it had some faults--the frequent stoppages to fix the ice slowed the game down too much--was pretty cool, and I figured others, even people who aren't hockey fans like me, would have found it interesting enough to give it some coverage.

And I was correct, except for the Washington Post. ESPN.com had a couple articles on the game and gave it a prominent place on its Website (the box above the headlines) on Tuesday. Si.com also gave it top placement in its headlines Tuesday and Wednesday morning. The New York Times had a staff-written article on the game and a column about the TV coverage. The Washington Times had TWO wire-service articles on the game, one on the game itself and another on the tailgating beforehand. My dad's in Florida, and he said even the Miami Herald had a fairly lengthy wire story on the game. And in the Post, we got a photo... oh, and a paragraph. And I shouldn't forget the box score, too.

This is just the latest in a series of oversights by the Post in its hockey coverage. Tarik El-Bashir does a fine job covering the Caps beat in the paper and on his blog. And Dan Steinberg has written some great stuff about the Caps over the last year on the D.C. Sports Bog, including some recent entertaining posts about new coach Bruce Boudreau. But outside of that, it doesn't appear that anyone at the Post even knows hockey exists. No Post columnist (not Wilbon, not Mike Wise, not Tom Boswell, not Sally Jenkins) has written a column about the Caps since, if my memory is correct, last January. (It may actually be December 2006, but I can't confirm that because the Post columnist archives don't go back that far.) Even more troubling, this hockey ignorance has led to the Post missing great story opportunities over the last two years that involved former Capitals players--for reasons that I can only surmise are a lack of knowledge of the league and the Caps' history.

Bengt Gustafsson, one of the most popular Caps players ever, coached Sweden to the gold medal at the 2006 Olympics. The Post covered the hockey tournament, but never wrote anything about Gustafsson's history with the Caps, interviewed him about memories of Washington, etc. I'm not even sure if the paper even mentioned Gustafsson's Washington connection. At a time when one can get coverage of sports from so many TV and Internet outlets, this kind of local coverage is what can distinguish a local newspaper and make it essential to its readers. But we didn't get it from the Post.

Perhaps even more inexcusable, when Scott Stevens was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame this fall, it got a couple sentences in the four or five paragraph article that made the Post about the Hall of Fame induction. This was amazing. Scott Stevens played more than a third of his career with the Caps, in the heyday of the franchise--when they made the playoffs every year and often finished in the top five of the league in the point standings (although they managed to find some ridiculous way to lose in the playoffs before they should have.) Scott Stevens, with his puck-handling skills and his legendary hip checks, was one of the most exciting players to ever suit up with the Caps and could probably still be called the second-best defenseman that ever played for the team (after Rod Langway). And yet the only mention of his Hall of Fame induction in the Post came in an article which devoted much more space to Mark Messier. No one at the Post could write a remembrance or tribute to Stevens--no one even bothered to even print his stats from his time with the Caps.

When the NHL came back from its extremely ill-advised lockout three years ago, the Post appeared to make a decision--it would cover the Capitals but would not cover the rest of the NHL. So that has meant that it won't send a staff writer to cover the NHL playoffs if the Caps aren't in them. And any time there is any actual NHL news that doesn't involve the Caps (a trade, a suspension, a rule change, whatever), it ends up buried somewhere in the Sports in Brief column--between the results of some tennis tournament in Monaco and the European soccer league scores. This even though we have arguably the best player in the NHL playing in Washington. The only staff or columnist articles it has run about the NHL, in general, have been about how nobody is paying any attention to the NHL.

Post editors have defended this decision based on things such as TV ratings, although they sent a reporter to Japan last summer to cover the World Track and Field Championships, which didn't exactly light up the Nielsens either. In that case, I suppose they thought that event was an important sporitng event that deserves coverage--and I actually agree. I'm just not sure why they've decreed that hockey is so unimportant that anything but last night's Caps game is not worthy of coverage. Maybe the pretty good ratings for the outdoor game--the highest TV ratings for an NHL regular season game in more than 10 years--will change their mind.