How Am I Better Than Anyone?

I go to this photo yet again.  Fitting, my buddy Brian is getting ready to say a tearful goodbye for a year in about a week.  He was the architect behind this amazing photo of me in my prime…

I think anyone who reads my stuff knows that I’m a pretty self deprecating.  I find that people like it.  People aren’t threatened by someone who talks down about themselves.  Sometimes this gets confused for a lack of confidence, and I wouldn’t classify myself as a highly confident guy.  But I don’t lack it either.  I’m just very self aware.  I know what my strengths are, and I know what my weaknesses are.  But I’m going to talk down about someone today.  Not because I think I’m good, but because of how embarrassingly bad this guy is.

This is brought up because of a writer named Joshua Cooper.  I actually brought him up a few weeks ago in a piece I did talking about the David Perron deal.

He did a piece on it too, or so he said anyway.  What he ACTUALLY did was use it as an opportunity to bash the Oilers.  Hey, I’m not going to be a hypocrite.  The best week I’ve ever had on here was on the back of 2 Oiler pieces where I crushed management and urged fans to boycott the team.  But, time and place.  He took the David Perron trade to try and mock the Oilers further.  He was only late on the trend by about a month.  Better than me at trends I guess.  I just got my very first pair of cords this week.  Yep, never got on the “cords train” back in 97/98, but I’m all in on cords now.

I had been following Cooper on twitter up until last week.  Even though the Perron trade piece he did was terrible, I assumed it was a 1 off and people are going to mock the Oilers (deservedly so) until they finally turn a corner.  But I stopped following Cooper last week and I had to go back on his twitter account to see why I unfollowed him.  I couldn’t find anything specific so I came to the conclusion that because he was no longer the Preds beat writer (he was fired), that I just thought the guy brings zero to the table.

I never would have seen his garbage blog that got me writing this had it not been sent to me.  I guess on one hand, awesome for him because I’m sure it’s gotten a lot of attention.  But call me crazy….I would like to be known as being good at something rather than being a joke among fans and peers.

I’m not going to post a link to the blog I’m referencing, bad enough that he’ll get more clicks because of this (8, assuming everyone who reads this clicks it twice).  But it was about how he is hoping that Jack Eichel and Connor McDavid go to Carolina and Arizona.

Thing is, had he talked about how it would be best for the league that those 2 go to struggling markets, I would have had ZERO issue with it.  Wouldn’t agree with it, but I totally get that point of view despite being an Oiler fan my entire life and living in Northern Alberta.  That would be the intelligent road to take.

But no, my man “Coop” instead tries to bash Edmonton and Buffalo.  Calls Edmonton “Hoth”.  I had to look up what the f*** Hoth was, I don’t speak geek.  Apparently it’s from Star Wars (and that’s no lie, the only Star Wars I’ve ever watched are the Family Guy episodes), and what he’s getting at is Edmonton is unbearably cold.  The forecast for Edmonton today?  High of +7.  The forecast for Nashville today where Cooper is from?  High +7.  But hey, it’s fashionable to bash Edmonton and “Coop” has to jump on these opportunities!

He later goes on to attempt to claim that the Oilers have ruined all their top picks.  Yakupov is the only one you can make that claim about, and he was the product of an awful draft and even then he likely should have been the Calder winner in 2013 after leading the league in rookie scoring.  He struggled under Dallas Eakins, we’ll see how he does under Todd Nelson.

Apparently according to “JC” they’ve ruined Draisaitl too because they sent him back to the WHL.  Ok…call me crazy but it might be a TAD BIT early to say they ruined a 19 year old, just thinking out loud.  But what do I know?  I’m just a lowly bottom of the barrel blogger.  I don’t have a gig with a great hockey writing organization like “Puck Daddy”.  Pretty bad these days when the Hockey News has a better reputation than you do, but “Puck Daddy” somehow willed their way to it.

Later on, he goes to the sources.  Bob McKenzie?  Elliotte Friedman?  John Shannon?  Darren Dreger?  GLENN HEALY!?  Nope.  “Cardiac Cane”.  This is like me writing a piece on how I believe the Oilers are going to win the Cup in 3 years and a blogger named “Lowe on Oil” agreeing with me.  Seriously!?  THAT guy thinks the Oilers are going to bust out of their 9 years of awfulness?  What are the odds!!?

He goes on to say that “Everyone wants it (except for Edmonton or Buffalo fanbases).”  Yeah, no doubt.  Us Canadians…you know, the country where 7 teams generate 2/3 of the league’s revenue…are always just craving the best players to be in the sun belt to boost those attendance numbers from 4 all the way up to 9 per game.  I’m also certain that fans of teams in the Pacific division would be all about McDavid coming to the division no matter which team it is.  So yeah, other than about 90% of fans, EVERYONE wants this, totally agree.

I also found this tweet from “the Coopster” later in the day:

@JoshuaCooper By virtue of being in warm weather, Arizona fans clearly are horrible and don’t deserve anything good in hockey life per my comments …

What fans??  Look, I get it.  American hockey writers have a chip on their shoulders when it comes to Canadians.  They feel like they’re looked down upon by Canadian fans and media, especially the ones that are amongst the sun belt teams.  “Fans here are more intelligent than you think, they love hockey here, yada, yada, yada”.  Well, “J”, my man, this is why we all think that.

Canadian hockey fans see pieces like this, and pieces like your boss Wyshynski does (and in fairness I can honestly say I’ve never read a word the guy has wrote but from hearing the podcast a few times I don’t have any respect for his hockey knowledge), and seeing a guy like Adrian Dater completely implode on twitter, do you REALLY wonder why we think this?!

But going back to him believing that it’s “best for all” that McDavid and Eichel end up in these markets, does he actually think it’ll fix them?

It won’t.  The Yotes had a winner.  3 straight years in the playoffs.  2012 they had home ice all the way through, went to the WCF.  This isn’t Pittsburgh and Washington, markets who had been proven to be great markets in the past.  In Raleigh, they won the freaking Cup!  They’ve had a guy who if he wasn’t at one time a superstar was definitely a huge draw in Eric Staal, and they STILL didn’t draw.  Short of the 80’s Oilers being reincarnated in either market, they aren’t drawing fans.

As for him taking runs at Buffalo, he’s already taken a massive beating for that from Sabres fans.  And a lot of Sabres fans made the same point I’m about to, which is why are you lumping the Sabres in with the Oilers!?  Buffalo hasn’t been awful forever!  This is their 2nd season of being at the bottom.  You can’t take every team which is bad and just start claiming their fans don’t deserve success because they’ve had a couple of brutal seasons.  The sad thing is that I don’t think Marissa Cooper realizes that.  I just think he honestly believes it’s fashionable to rip on the bottom end teams, so he blindly does it thinking it’s cheeky.  If it was well thought out, then maybe.

But that’s my biggest issue, is NONE of this is well thought out.  And yet this guy is somehow got a gig.  WOW.  I’m more stunned than pissed off about all this.  Just simply stunned that I’m actually better than someone who does this for a living and not in his spare time.

I’m not looking to get attention for any of this.  I’m not going to call the guy out on twitter or tweet this at him, he comes off as a guy who is keyboard tough anyway.  And I’m definitely not saying you should read my stuff because I do this more for fun than anything and I’m far from a pro at it.  But the problem is that he’s far from the only one in that position.  Keyboard tough, would run if anyone ever called him out in person, keeps trying to be the Spike Lee to your Reggie Miller, it’s disgusting.  How about looking to be good at your job?  It’s just this crazy theory I’ve always had.

Follow me on twitter @TJ_Soups