I guess it turns out that Russo is actually a credible reporter who has plenty of connections, who woulda thought?
The amount of information in this article really shows you how connected Russo is. I understand that he absolutely hated Fenton, but he clearly had sources to back up the tidbits he'd drop in podcasts.
He has sources and connections and I'm sure he's been hearing stuff all season, but this past season he played way too fast and loose on the radio/podcasts with the rumors. The bit about Fenton agreeing to the Nino trade "in two seconds!" that people were parroting in multiple threads earlier in the year was contradicted by his own story today. If you were to go through and compare notes between the podcast info and what he's published since, there'll be plenty of similar examples.
So why publish it all now? I'm sure part of it is that there's no danger of Russo making his job even harder next year, but I'm also sure that a whole lot of tongues have gotten a whole lot looser in the last few days. As extensive as the article is it's bound to be a fraction of what he's heard over the last year: the fraction that he's been able to properly verify through multiple sources over the past few days.
So yeah, he's as good a source of Wild rumors as anyone, but unless it's published we still don't have a good idea of how reliable it is. And fans (especially non-Wild fans) tend to take it all as fact and jump to conclusions, which gets to be obnoxious.
This is also one of these situations where Fenton doesn't do himself much good by walling himself off, but maybe he'll gives his own side of things eventually. I don't doubt that this stuff happened, but it's all presented with the same incredulous style Russo's been stuck in all year. "It doesn't make any sense!" "What was he thinking?!" It'd be nice to know what he was actually thinking and how aware he even was of what was going on.
