I rarely ask questions in press conferences, but when I do it’s because I’m fairly certain I’ll get a good response.
The other night, after the Pittsburgh-Washington game, I was in a packed press room when Bruce Boudreau stood at the podium.
The traditional media usually ask the most questions, typically to get quotes to fill in the angle of their story. That makes the questions relatively lame and not newsworthy. Questions such as: “How important was it to kill that power play after taking that penalty?”
Seriously? What do you expect the coach to say? That it wasn’t important to kill the power play? The only reason that question is asked is so the writer can enhance a passage on how the power play did. However, the coaches and players are used to taking softball questions from traditional media, so they answer it. It’s not bad or wrong, but who cares?
Several minutes in, I spoke up and mentioned something that deserved to be mentioned: Matt Cooke’s hit on Alex Ovechkin, which was knee-on-knee and could have ended Ovechkin’s season. The Penguins said they ‘clipped skates’ so I asked the coach if it was knee-on-knee.
Boudreau exploded.
“It was Matt Cooke. Need we say more? Its not like its his first rodeo. Hes done it to everybody and then he goes to the ref and says: What did I do? He knows damn well what he did. Theres no doubt in my mind that hes good at it and he knows how to do it. He knows how to pick this stuff. We as a league, we still buy into this that, Oh it was an accidental thing.”
I asked because no one else had, and it was indeed an angle I woud’ve led with on Capitals Outsider. When traditional media and other bloggers ignore a part of the game that I feel deserves a headline, I’ll be sure to cover it. After several minutes of ‘gotta get a quote for the article’ questions, I took the opportunity to mention something that should’ve been the first question asked.
The Post wrote a blog post about it. The quote appeared on several other sites, including Yahoo, ESPN and dozens of others. It was used on television, including Pardon the Interruption on ESPN, I’m told. Journalists don’t need to be attributed for asking the question that leads to the news, so there was no mention of me, and that’s fine and I understand that.
Here’s my beef: Why did it take a blogger to ask the obvious question after high profile journalists fished for routine quotes about the game as window dressing for their article?