Yesterday was trade deadline day, and usually that is a day of excitement and keyboard-busting F5s. This year was gearing up to be an even more exciting one than usual thanks to all the weird moves prior to the Olympics and the trade embargo during the Olympics. In fact trade deadline day is one of the three most exciting days in the NHL (the other being draft day and July 1 when unrestricted free agent signings begin).
Because of the excitement, there is an intense amount of media coverage. I don’t know if there is more obsession over a Steve Jobs keynotes or NHL trade deadline day; Steve Jobs never has a 9-5 TV show to cover his keynote!
I never get to watch the coverage because I’m at work, but I can imagine that Wednesday on TSN started with a lot of speculating on the big names that would be moving. In the end, the entire day was a huge bust! A bunch of AHLers were swapped so that clubs could shore up their farm teams, and a bunch of 4th liners and low round draft picks got moved around. I wonder what their panel talked about for 8 hours?
Since there was all that hype and commercials about NHL trade deadline day (did you catch the commercials on CTV’s Olympics coverage), they had to talk about something. There was a lot of non-news reported, such as Kaberle saying that Burke would forward any offers he received to him. And the pièce de résistance of useless information:
It’s an article about trading Stempniak but they bluntly acknowledge that “[w]here Stempniak is going is still unknown“! The article was updated with details some time later, but why was there such a rush to publish an incomplete article? I can only surmise that they feel they need to contribute to the excitement and rush of nothing happening.