When hockey players get all a-Twitter

One thing I've learned since I started watching hockey a couple of years ago is that there are different kinds of celebrities. The kind that I had been used to reading about, the TV actors, movie stars, and singers, are a different breed of celebrity than these athlete types. (It's kind of like high school cliques, with lots more money, I guess.)

If an actor does something wrong, he or she sees the consequences right away, regardless of how quickly their publicist steps in. (If the publicist quits, then that's a whole other story.) Take Mel Gibson, for example. Things went downhill very quickly after his drunken anti-Semitic rant, and now that he's been caught on tape insulting basically everyone along with the girlfriend he left his wife for, I don't expect to see him in a successful movie anytime soon. When actors make less colossal mistakes, they usually rely on their well-paid entourage to help concoct an appropriate apology. (Like the Kristen Stewart controversy that ended almost as quickly as it began.)

The sports world is a little bit different. Usually athletes aren't groomed quite as well for the public eye as actors are. On the flip side, the consequences aren't always the same. Sean Avery, best described as his generation's greatest douchebag, continues to play in the NHL despite being his generation's greatest douchebag. (Not even a suspension could stop him, but I guess the New York Rangers know what they want.) Athletes don't always see the error of their ways or have to back up their incorrect actions.

Earlier this summer, Paul Bissonnette deleted his Twitter account after getting some heat about the inappropriate content of his tweets. Personally, I didn't necessarily enjoy jokes about strippers and whatnot, but there are a lot of guys out there who act like that in the locker room, and I guess BizNasty decided to live up to his screenname and not be a hypocrite about the kind of guy he is. He wasn't outwardly trying to offend anyone, but I'm sure he knew there would be someone out there who wasn't as entertained by his tweets as he was.

Dan Ellis, on the other hand, is another story. I started following him after he was traded to the Habs, hoping to get to know a little more about the potential new goalie. I learned about his son learning to poop in a toilet. I read an awful lot about his (tacky) custom car. I read his opinions on how the Canadian media are "crazy", something he learned especially after he "was a Hab for two days". Yes, he made a passive-aggressive comment about a jersey he's never even worn. Maybe Ellis could call up Jay Leach or Doug Janik to find out what it's really like to be a Hab.

Perhaps Ellis realized that he could get attention from the crazy Canadian media by typing up some tweets that would really get us all riled up. First, he retweeted a few things from football player and Kardashian-dater Reggie Bush, without realizing that football is literally and figuratively an entirely different game). Then he followed up these comments with a few sentences about how he deserves to be as rich as he is because he's good at what he does, he trains hard, and NHL players are not "not a dime a dozen unlike many other professions."


Now, the millions of things that are wrong with his statements are probably best left to another blog post (by me, who often tries to defend some of our overpaid athletes). But it's Ellis' follow-up to these comments that really disgusts me.

Yes, that's right. He didn't apologize. He just read every single outraged response he got and fired right back at them. He blocked a few people too. I'm not sure if Dan Ellis is just trying to stir up controversy and get some attention, or if he really does want to anger us "dime-a-dozen" folk, because we have nothing better to do than listen to Springsteen and Twitter and spend our paltry salaries on hockey tickets in order to further inflate the egos of "special" guys like him.


What happens next? If the NHL is anything like Hollywood, Steve Yzerman will bury his face in his hands, get on the phone, hurl a few obscenities at Danny-boy, and we'll get the half-hearted apology we deserve. And maybe Alex Auld's stock will go way up. Personally, I've never been happier to be an Alex Auld fan in my life.