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.

Will someone wake up the Washington Post's sports columnists and tell them the Caps are a good story?

One of my favorite topics to blog about over the years has been the Washington Post's hockey coverage--because not many people really care about it, even fewer also blog about it (one of the guys at On Frozen Blog, but that's about it) but also because no one pays more attention to it than me. (That's not necessarily a good thing or particularly healthy, but it's just the truth and I can't help it.)

The day-to-day beat coverage of the Caps and the placement of stories on days after games--and features on off-days--is fine and I have no complaint about that. My problem is with the columnists at the Post, who seem to have abandoned the Caps as the team spent the last month and a half going from a group in disarray to a red-hot team that looks like it may have a decent shot at making waves in the playoffs. Sounds like a good story that a sports columnist would be interested in, doesn't it?

And yet somehow there have been FOUR TIMES as many columns written about the Nats in the last month and a half than about the Caps, even though the Nats didn't play their first game of the season until this past Thursday. Now I like the Nats, I follow the Nats and I read most of those columns. But Tom Boswell, the most senior and best Post sports columnist, wrote 13 columns about the Nats since spring training started (including a couple containing such ridiculous optimism about the team that I think family members of Nats players made fun of them.) I know there's a romanticism about spring training, but that's a lot of columns about practice. In that same time period, he wrote one about the Caps (to be fair, it was a good one.) He wrote the same number of columns about the Orioles in that time period.

(By the way, all these column numbers are approximate, because the Post's new website is so bad and hard to use that every columnist archive either was impossible to find or was missing columns that I remembered reading.)

So you say, did other columnists pick up the slack on the Caps while Boswell was delirious from sun poisoning in Florida? Actually, not really. Jason Reid, who just became a columnist in February and is already pretty good, went down to Florida and has written three columns already about the Nats (including a really good one Saturday about the change at the catching position). His tally of Caps columns since he began: zero. (He has written a few about the Wizards.)

How about Tracee Hamilton? The count on her from mid-February to now was three Wizards columns, three Nats columns and two Caps columns. Mike Wise has written no columns about the Caps since...I'm not sure, but not since Presidents' Day. John Feinstein wrote one in mid-Februrary, and went back to college basketball (which is fine, because that's his specialty, although he probably knows the most about hockey of all the sports columnists.) And finally, there's Sally Jenkins, who I don't think has written about hockey since the 1990s.

I'm sure if the Post editors were reading this, they would point to Tarik El-Bashir's "On Hockey" column as a substitute for Boswell, et. al. El-Bashir, who was formerly the Caps beat writer and now covers Georgetown basketball, knows a lot about hockey and his columns are always interesting and often deal with strategy, important issues within the team or how a particular player is doing. But half of them don't even appear in the print edition of the sports section. (Yeah, I know, at 40, I'm just about the youngest person that actually still reads the print edition, but let's face it: If a sports column doesn't appear in the print edition, it means the editors don't consider it as important as all the articles that did make it to print.) And as I said earlier, the Post web site is such a mess lately, it's pretty easy to miss stuff these days--I almost missed El-Bashir's web-only column last week because I'd been busy that day and hadn't had time to check the Caps Insider blog where it was linked until I was on my way to the game.

What makes me even more upset about this is all the great column ideas that any editor or columnist should be able to come up with but that aren't being written. There's the mystery of Alex Ovechkin (why did he have such a mediocre first four and a half months of the season and then all of a sudden look like himself again?). There's the mystery of Alex Semin (is any local athlete as mystifying, both in the ups and downs of his play and his refusal to ever be interviewed in English? Can someone follow him around for a day and see if he insists on speaking Russian to the woman behind the deli counter at Giant?) There's the mystery of the Caps' new defensive system (what exactly are they doing that's so different?) There's the mystery of the Caps goalie situation (there are a lot of fans who think the Caps' best goalie is currently playing in Hershey.) And then there's the obvious story for the last week of the season: Who should the Caps want to play in the first round of the playoffs? Who should they not want to play? I've heard hosts on sports radio lead discussions on this topic--the Post can't dive in?

The Post has certainly made some progress in their coverage of the Caps over the past few years--Dan Steinberg, of course, does some great feature stuff on the Caps, from Ovechkin getting pictures with Michelle Obama to why Baltimore is into the Caps. And I'm sure in the playoffs, we'll get some more Caps features from the Post and regular columns. But if the columnists aren't following the team during the year, are they going to have any idea what's going on when they have to write about the team in the playoffs when it matters? I guess we'll see when the playoffs start next week, but the paper's performance these past few months doesn't give me hope.

For Wilbon, it was time to go

I posted this as a comment on Dan Steinberg's D.C. Sports Bog, and a few other commenters seemed to like it, so I figured I'd post it here as my return to blogging about D.C. sports media. And since it originated as a comment on another blog, it's much shorter than my usual blog post. It's a reaction to Michael Wilbon's announcement that he's leaving the Washington Post to go full-time to ESPN after 32 years at the newspaper.

Michael Wilbon was once a very good columnist who I looked forward to reading after every Redskins game and other major sporting events, and 10 years ago he was probably the most important opinionmaker in D.C. sports. But anyone who tells you Wilbon's departure is a big loss for the Post either doesn't read the Post sports section regularly or doesn't care about D.C. sports.

In recent years since his PTI and ESPN fame--and especially since he stopped being a regular Monday morning Redskins columnist a few years ago--Wilbon has become almost completely detached from D.C. sports. He's written more columns about the Miami Heat in the last two months than he's written on the Caps and Nats combined the last two years. And every column he writes that isn't about the NBA is basically mailed in.

Even more troubling, in his columns and especially his chats, he's seemed to show a disrespect to D.C. sports fans, from his gratuitous, often lacking in fact, shots at Ovechkin to his attacks on Redskins fans for basically caring too much about the Redskins.

And the worst part is he doesn't even seem to read his own paper--or even his own columns. When he wrote earlier this year that Ovechkin "cannot" win a championship, he got asked about it in his chat and claimed he'd never written such a thing (this despite the fact that Steinberg had done a whole post on it). The most recent example of how out of touch he is was just this week, when someone asked in his chat about Colin Cowherd's comments regarding John Wall and his response was: "I hope you are accurately quoting Colin, and fairly summarizing his positions." This, of course, after Steinberg had written extensively about Cowherd's comments on this site, and a number of other writers had also slammed them in the sports world.

If a D.C. sports columnist can't even bother to read his own newspaper for news about the local sports teams he's supposed to be writing about, it's time for him to go work for ESPN full time.

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.

Why does Michael Wilbon know more about the Phoenix Suns than the Washington Nationals?

No one else seemed to notice this stunning revelation from Michael Wilbon's Washingtonpost.com Web chat last Monday, but I think it's worthy of note:

Bowie, Md.: Will you be at the Nationals' new park for Opening Day? Save me
a parking space.

Michael Wilbon: Nope...When, by the way, is Opening Day here? I will go and
sit in the stands and watch baseball the way I did when I was a kid...Well,
I still do it at least a couple of times a summer (after a boycott in the
mid-1990s after baseball failed us, its fans)...I'll be neck-deep in NBA
hoops and Final Four when the baseball season opens.

So Michael Wilbon is employed as a sports columnist at the Washington Post, and he doesn't even know when Opening Day is for the Washington Nationals--which not only opens the season for the team but also represents the opening of a new stadium? Does he read his own newspaper? Look, I understand with all his other commitments (PTI, NBA coverage), that Wilbon has basically become a columnist who writes about national issues and occasionally slums with a column about the Redskins head coaching search or the Wizards. He's written more columns in the last month about the Phoenix Suns and Shaquille O'Neal than he's written in three years about the Nationals (I believe the official count there is 3 to 1.*) And he and Tony Kornheiser demonstrated their complete ignorance of hockey and the Capitals on "Full Court Press" the other night But isn't there a minimal amount of knowledge of the Washington area sports scene you should have to be a columnist at the Washington Post? Is there a test we can give Wilbon like the guy did with his girlfriend in the movie Diner?

*This blog posting corrected following initial publishing after discovering that Wilbon did write a Nats-related column in August 2005.

Post on hockey: The hopeful and the disappointing

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how disappointing the Washington Post's hockey coverage was. At the All-Star break, I figured it was time for a follow-up. Unfortunately, as the Caps have rocketed to within one point of first place in the last month, the Post seems to have taken one step forward and two steps back.

First, I must praise the Post for actually having a columnist, Mike Wise, write a column on the Caps! It had only been about a year or so--at least--since any of the Post columnists (Wilbon, Wise, Jenkins or Boswell) had written anything on the professional hockey team in town. And Wise's column was pretty good and even made some news. Surprisingly, it wasn't about how well the team was playing, but he did get Olie Kolzig to speculate on the possibility of retirement and say a couple things about new coach Bruce Boudreau that raised some eyebrows (complaining about how Boudreau doesn't handle goalies as well as previous coach Glen Hanlon, although I think they came out worse than Olie intended.)

I also will say that the Caps have been getting more prominent play in the sports section, with game articles often appearing on the front page in recent weeks. That's nice, and I know it makes some people feel good, but I care less about whether the announcement of Alexander Ovechkin's 13 year, $124 million contract gets a prominent layout on the front of the sports page (which it should and did) and more about the coverage of that contract. And that's where the Post's coverage has been puzzlingly lacking.

Ovechkin signed the biggest contract in the history of the NHL. It was huge news throughout the hockey world. ESPN.com had at least two of its writers pen pieces analyzing the contract, whether it makes sense, what it means to the future of hockey in Washington, etc. SI.com has one of their writers opine on the same subject. The wisdom of Ovechkin's contract was even a topic for discussion last Sunday at the first period break on the first NBC telecast of the NHL season.

But in the Post, there was the article the day after the contract reporting on its details and the press conference announcing it, written by Caps beat writer Tarik El-Bashir. And El-Bashir wrote a note the next day about how Ovechkin's teammates were teasing him about the contract. And that was about it.

OK, George Solomon, in his weekly Sunday column, did include a paragraph about it. But not one of the Post's superstar columnists wrote anything about the deal. Was it a good move for the Caps? A bad move? What kind of vote of confidence for hockey in Washington is this by Caps owner Ted Leonsis? You didn't hear any of that from anyone at the Post. How about an examination of whether the deal makes business sense for the Caps and Leonsis? When the Post has made its rare forays into writing about the NHL in the last couple years, all it has seemingly written about is how the league's TV ratings are bad, it's tough for teams to make money, etc. How can a team that loses money afford this deal? Seems like an interesting idea for a story--but not at the Post. (The paper, somewhat remarkably, doesn't even have a reporter covering sports business and media, a hugely important beat in this day and age and a beat even the Washington Times has assigned a reporter.)

So a huge national hockey story which involves the hockey team in Washington gets no commentary and analysis from the local paper. It's virtually ignored. And I'm not even angry more, just kind of sad. I hope if the Caps make the playoffs, someone alerts sports editor Emilio Garcia-Ruiz. Maybe he'll send a columnist--although it may not be unless they make the finals.

(By the way, as they neglect the Caps and other local teams, the Post did add a THIRD beat reporter to the Redskins beat for next season--because who doesn't pick up the paper and say, "Wow, not enough Redskins articles today." But I'll get to that in a future 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.