Angry Birds

On Saturday afternoon, I read the news that my little buddy Mike Duco had been traded. Mike had been playing with the Rochester Amerks the past few seasons (farm club of the Florida Panthers) and his rights had been traded to the Vancouver Canucks for Sergei Shirokov.

We all know the Vancouver Canucks are coming off an extremely successful year, falling one win short of winning the Stanley Cup, and have managed to keep the team mostly-intact going into the 2011-12 season.

Thrust into the spotlight, Mike's Twitter followers went up by nearly a thousand in the span of four days -- he had about 700 followers prior to the trade, and as of Tuesday night was at more than 1,700.

That's good ... right? Wrong. Turns out, the laziest slob in sports media Greg Wyshynski over at Puck Daddy went through Mike's old tweets, as though he's some kind of genius, and found a tweet where Mike had chirped the Sedins for diving during the playoffs. I have had a long-standing dislike for Mr. Wyshynski, punctuated by him putting up a link to a story I worked VERY HARD on and pulled a quote from my story, and while he did put a link to my story, I still would preferred he done HIS OWN INTERVIEW instead of COPYING AND PASTING MY QUOTE. Lazy, lazy, lazy.

Now, apparently, he has nothing better to do than go through some kid's old tweets and make a huge deal about it? And I didn't see that he had done any kind of interview with Mike. Just slapped up a bunch of crap he made up. "But this isn't a story about Twitter; it's a story about an AHL plug, who never thought he was getting traded to the Stanley Cup runners-up, talking smack about them." Plug? Pardon me? Has this guy ever even seen Mike play? I'm willing to bet probably not.

When I saw Mike last night, I said "Hey, congrats on the big trade, very exciting!" and Mike said, "Yeah, everybody on Twitter hates me now."

Umm what? Apparently, all these armchair GMs in Vancouver are telling Michael he will be playing in the AHL next year ...

Wyshynski's post was made at Mon Jul 11 10:57am EDT ... and that's when the shit all started coming down the pipe line.

Here's a lovely selection of a couple tweets sent Mike's way since the news broke of his apparent dislike for diving ... not really sure how that makes him a douchebag OR an asshole? I've known Mike for many years, since we were both in high school, I'll say, and I've never known him to be anything other than a good hockey player and even better kid. I'm proud to say my buddy Mike is a member of the Canucks organization, and so is he.

All these gutless haters hiding behind their tweets are cowards. Calling out a new guy on your team for criticizing them when he played somewhere else? Come on.

Mike has since apologised, saying he has learned his lesson. Well, living in relative-obscurity for the last ... however long, and now all of a sudden being scrutinized for everything he does? Next thing you know, someone will be chirping him for what he likes to eat for lunch (Sushi ... Mike, doesn't Sushi have carbs in it?) and what he does in his spare time.

I'm still waiting to hear back from Mike, so I'll edit this later :) Just wanted to get it up there right away for all the haters out there chirping Mike. I'm sure they'll all start chirping me now.