The Tim Hortons/Starbucks post earlier upthread makes it all sense. Hipsters have made it a thing to hate Nickelback. Hating Don Cherry is the hockey hipster thing. Think you sound all smart and score points with the "cool kids", but....
You're really dealing in a lot of stereotypes here. When a PEI police chief is threatening to torture DUI offenders with Nickelback music and Father John Misty is giving interviews about how much he loves "How You Remind Me", it calls into question what you think a hipster is...
In the case of Don Cherry, what is it that people hate him for? Many people dislike his politics. That's fair, and when you continually insert strident political views into your non-political platform, you're going to lose a clean 50 percent of your audience off that hop, and galvanize the other half. Way it goes.
Others think his views on the game itself are antiquated. This is a funny one, because so much of that reputation is tied up in his socio-political outlook. His fondness for violence, aggressiveness and swift retaliation all line up perfectly with an individualist conservative and pro-military political stance, but when you get down to it have almost nothing to do with Xs and Os. On the other hand, his campaigns against touch icing and hitting from behind were ahead of their time, and his ever-present bugaboo about defensemen screening their own goaltenders is more or less evergreen. Parsing this comes down to a willingness to hear to what he's saying, and I don't think that lines up with one's choice of coffee.
One thing that's becoming increasingly clear to me though, is that he's an
awful broadcaster at this point. Older videos show a guy making lucid points with a knack for captivating stories. Now, how often does he finish a full sentence? A large part of the youngest hockey-watching demographic has grown up alongside the "Coaches Corner Transcribed" Youtube series, which highlight just how broken and disjointed his words and thoughts are when he's on camera at this point. Another poster said the same about Bob Cole in another thread, but Cole is background noise for the game itself. I'd listen to Cole randomly shout "oh baby!" over game footage any day. But Cherry has a talking head segment, and uses it to shout sentence fragments for five minutes. If
Coaches Corner was a new segment introduced this year, not a single person watching would get more than a few moments of sense out of what was going on. As it is, it's more of a blank canvas for people to project what they already decided about Don Cherry a decade ago.
This from a guy who makes his own coffee, but gets Starbucks on the way to work if I'm running late (it's two right turns in and out of their parking lot), and Tim's on my lunch break (it's walkable with only one traffic light crossing).