Why a True Hockey Fan Knows To Avoid ESPN

The NHL awards are Wednesday (predictions to come sometime before the actual awards) and ESPN thought it would be a good idea to put a page together that allows fans to vote on each award.

A pretty decent idea, if it were executed. Of course ESPN, who puts maybe .001% of their budget towards the NHL, would find a way to screw this up. All I can say is thank god ESPN didn't win the TV rights for the NHL.

Anyway onto the mistakes:

Here is the link to the original story, but I'm sure by the time you read this these mistakes will have been fixed. Because of that there are screenshots below.

http://espn.go.com/sportsnation/post/_/id/6688754/who-walk-away-vegas-winner

First up we have the Hart trophy, which is pretty much the MVP in the NHL. One of the nominees is Martin St. Louis. Anyone who has paid even the slightest attention to hockey over the past five years would know that St. Louis plays for the Tampa Bay Lightning, not the St. Louis Blues. Still, this is an understandable mistake compared to what's to come.

On to our second picture, which involves a mix-up that is quite a bit more embarrassing. The Calder is given to the NHL rookie of the year, and one of the candidates this season is Jeff Skinner. Skinner is the youngest player in the NHL, and also one of the bright future stars. He would love to bring Carolina back to the Stanley Cup, where they last were in 2006. That is the Carolina Hurricanes of course, not the Carolina Panthers. It's alright ESPN, we understand it is a rule that you put some sort of NFL propaganda in every post on your site.

Finally we come to another Martin St. Louis mistake. Besides being nominated for the Hart, he is also nominated for the Lady Byng trophy, given to the athlete who shows the best sportsmanship. St. Louis has shown great sportsmanship throughout the season, as a winger who can handle his temper when he gets into skirmishes with the other team. That's right I said winger, as in he plays right wing for the Lightning, not goalie as ESPN has it listed. This mistake irks me the most because it is just stupidity. It's not like they had his name stuck on the head or they were thinking of an NFL team, the person who typed this in literally had to know nothing about St. Louis and was too lazy to not Google him.

All-in-all ESPN is the best sports website to check scores, and stuff like that. But with their hockey stuff, and this caries over into a lot of other sports, there are much better websites that have people who actually care about the sport running them.

Update: Pittsburgh is also spelled wrong in the coach of the year award.