Puck Daddy is a Complete Embarrassment, from Ryan Lambert to Yahoo
Let's first acknowledge that it's not Puck Daddy’s fault that it is the way it is.
Every cheap shot in the last few years, every embarrassing journalistic melodrama, is entirely the fault of the Buffalo Sabres being a dirty hockey team and getting away with it.
This was not only on the internet when no one from Yahoo tried to cover that story with some degree of integrity, but also because the media barely even gave the Sabres’ dirtiness a second look. Dug a deep chip into the organization's shoulder, and ever since the sports media world — including the NHL (but not the Sabres themselves) — have been paying the price.
That dirtiness led Yahoo’s abhorrent and incompetent manager to go out and hire Ryan Lambert in a misguided and ultimately tragic pursuit of "toughness," and that summer also gave Greg Wyshynski a three-year extension for the exact same idiotic reason.
The incident in which Ryan Lambert wrote a hit piece on John Scott, in such a way that it contained numerous easily debunked false statement, is just the latest point which highlights why Puck Daddy doesn't deserve to even write in the sports media this season, and the reasons why are obvious.
What, for example, was Lambert, who is widely known as perhaps the most pathetic actual hockey writer in the business (even Eklund has broken a handful of trades, right?) doing online against TSN’s competent journalists in the fight for early season page views?
The answer wasn't "writing a quality story that would provide insight into some aspect of NHL play," though at this point in the season you could probably say that about any Puck Daddy writer, because they're almost as useless in as Lambert is. Puck Daddy has 14 decent articles this season through three weeks, which is just sad. You'd have to think even a pretty-good local beat writer would have more than that.
The hatchet job was so clearly intended to do what it did, though, that it leads one to ask a very simple question:
How stupid is Lambert, really?
All the evidence you've ever needed came as he was sitting in the press box, waiting for word that of course he was getting attacked on Twitter. He literally said, incredulous that this was the result, "Hatchet job?"
With a question mark.
Can you imagine how dumb, or at least ignorant, you have to be to write an article with obvious factual errors days after the traditional media has covered the story, see respectable sports commentators print the actual facts, and try to act as though you did not in fact do the thing you just did? If he thought he was fooling anyone, he's an idiot. If he thought he didn't libel Scott, he is absurdly negligent and has no place in print.
Well, he has no place in the media regardless, but you see the point.
On the other hand, maybe Lambert really didn't know it was a hit piece, and his brain does work about as well as he writes. In that case, he is just a dangerous idiot, unaware of his own injurious capabilities. At least George had the common decency to take Lennie out to the pond and put him out of his misery. That Puck Daddy continues to not only pay him hundreds of thousands of dollars, but use him online just about every day, tells you all you need to know about the kind of malicious intent with which they enter every news cycle.
(Lambert, by the way, definitely seems like the kind of person who accidentally hugged a rabbit to death as a kid.)
The problem with firing Lambert is that this does nothing to hurt an organization that apparently needs to have an entire library's worth of books thrown at it before it gets any kind of message.
Put him on unpaid leave for five, 10, hell even 40 days. What happens? Oh no, they can't tap a useless piece of trash for copy! What are they going to do, call up a good writer from the ranks of interns and give him more space than Ryan freaking Lambert? How will they ever deal with that kind of tough bounce?
(This goes without mentioning, by the way, that Lambert has somehow not been subject to a libel judgment and likely won't catch as much in the way of unpaid leave as all that.)
But it's all for the company, right? That's why Lambert still has a job in this business, isn't it? Well when given the chance to talk about the story, Lambert predictably turtled, preferring instead to say nothing — or maybe because he couldn't find a primatologist to translate his grunts and gestures. Instead, he let his fellow Puck Daddy employees offer their own sheepish no-comments because there was nothing they could say that wouldn't have been seen as stabbing him in the back.
Obviously, though, the continual use of Lambert is an organizational imperative. They have more skilled writer they could be using, but they choose not to because of toughness and the importance placed on it by this misguided and woebegone circus of a media corporation. Perhaps it's to serve as a distraction from the fact that Puck Daddy employs some of the dirtiest writers in hockey, and seem not to discourage those that don't fall into this category from similar behavior.
Friday's story, for instance, overshadowed the fact that Greg Wyshynski elected to run a violent hockey dad story on the same day. If Wyshynski’s stories were read by anyone, this ridiculous selective coverage of a local police blotter item would have resulted in disparagement of the NHL and hockey generally, and likely a call from Brendan Shanahan.
That it didn't is only happenstance, and perhaps incompetence on Wyshynski's part. I'd say you'll get 'em next time, kid, but nobody follows your web page.
Of course, not even having Ryan Lambert act as a diversion isn't enough to hide what a dirtbag Harrison Mooney is. The fact that there are writer in the Professional Hockey Writers’ Association upset that he's even wasting union resources appealing a libel judgment tells you the low opinion his brethren have of him, largely because of what he's likely to do to them the second they turn their back to him at press conferences. Mooney's actions at any given moment of his career are highly likely to be inexcusable, probably even among his coworkers, but he's still getting two posts a day on Puck Daddy’s main page over the course of his unfortunate career.
It's only fitting, really, that Greg Wyshynski is the captain of this ship of fools.
He hasn't faced a lawsuit in a while, but the three criminal defamation investigations and a fine he picked up early in his career tell you everything you need to know about him. Here he is smearing Thomas Vanek. Here he is attacking Wade Redden. This kind of thing is very instructive as to what Puck Daddy values: garbage, plain and simple.
Maybe he's good in the room, but leading by example? Hoo boy.
That story where he tried to question Redden's work ethic, he also took a number of other shots at hockey players, then refused to address retweets from a number of reporters to back it up — as per The Code — and instead let Yahoo’s corporate office take questions instead. When you're deferring in the honor and toughness department to Yahoo’s corporate office, you're a coward and weasel of the lowest order, slumped so close to the ground that it's a wonder the front of his press pass doesn't have feces on it after every column.
This hidebound view of how to write about hockey when you're not good enough to get a job with a newspaper is obviously pushed by new CEO Marissa Mayer, who's as complicit in Lambert and Wyshynski's actions as anyone else.
Again, Lambert was out there on a Friday of a slow news week, and you don't send him online with anything but malice. He might not have said, "Go attack a professional hockey player with baseless hyperbole, Ryan," but he didn't need to. That's implicit in putting him out there at all. Even if you were senseless enough to ask him to write a quality story, he's still going to be the scorpion that stings the frog taking him across the river; you can't expect him to not-do the thing he's only ever been asked to do.
This is true of Wyshynski as well. Wyshynski's role is to make sure everyone reads sensational headlines, and maybe thinks twice about speaking with a Yahoo reporter, because if they do, there's a good chance they're getting misquoted in tomorrow’s article.
It may be overstating things to say Mayer should be fired — again, Yahoo probably views this kind of thing as meritorious because of how deranged the company has grown — but a shareholder suit? Absolutely. She already got flack for appearing in a Vogue photoshoot a few months ago. That was during the summer, and nothing even happened, really, as a result. This was in a real, ostensibly fact-based article, and did real damage to an actual professional hockey player’s reputation. The consequences have to be more considerable, and she should face civil liability too. Jamie Dimon was fined $13 billion for securities fraud, and really, this is so much worse.
And that's the thing: These are the kinds of writers Yahoo can roll at any time, and if this is going to be their response every time they're losing the ratings battle, NHL teams might just stop speaking with their reporters so they don't get their best players defamed.
Maybe with no one else out there Puck Daddy can actually complete a comeback. There's still 71 games left of this season, and that's a lot of opportunity for someone to really get libeled very badly. Lambert and Wyshynski probably won't even be suspended without pay for a healthy percentage of them.
If you're Dan Wetzel or Les Carpenter or anyone else with an expiring contract, how do you not quit right this second? Who would want to go down with this ship? Not only is it taking on water at a rate that makes the Titanic look like a minor nautical inconvenience, it's also morally indefensible. Imagine having to answer questions about the latest disgusting hatchet piece du jour for another six months? Good lord.
Whether you'd actually be fired is another matter entirely, given that the guy running your sports blog is just about the worst writer in all of professional sports. Again, that Greg Wyshynski allowed his blog to grow this bad is entirely entirely entirely the overreaction to the dirtiness of the Sabres. Plus the Lamberts and Mooney extensions this summer.
There's also the matter of the mishandling of flex time at Yahoo under Mayer’s purview, and a litany of other baffling decisions, but it's only recently that even the dumbest of dumb Yahoo shareholders have started calling for her head. Filling the shareholder meetings and chanting "Fire Marissa" is all well and good, but you dummies are still buying stock.
And that's really all fanboy CEO Marissa Mayer cares about. Remember all the proclamations when she first took over the company — no, not the ones about toppling Google, although, haha — that she wasn't in this to make money? "If I want to make money, I'll go write more code," and whatever else she said. Well, ad prices went up between $1 and $4 for 2011-12, between $2 and $8 for 2012-13, and an additional $1 to $4 this year. During that time, Puck Daddy’s unique page views per story dropped from 43 to 39 to 21 to (currently) three.
And also, Mayer is the one signing off on all Puck Daddy hires. She had to rubber-stamp the Lambert, Wyshynski, and Mooney contracts. She has continually given her vote of confidence to Wyshynski, who's done nothing to deserve it. Hell, she probably had to sign off on that new logo.
From top to bottom, this is an organization bereft of reason, care or accountability, and it probably always will be because they're still selling close to 96 percent of their IPO shares. Nothing is going to change because nothing has to change. It's tough to shareholders are complicit, per se, but by purchasing stock they're voting with their wallets. And that vote is for disgusting, deleterious journalism. Straight ticket.
It's reprehensible and unjustifiable. And it's not going to change.
Great point! That alone exposes that the guy doesn't have a clue what he's talking about.
