Post by GoVoysGo on Dec 25, 2015 20:57:54 GMT -5
Mason Jay Calls It A Career; Ronel To Assume EIC
TFHN - Daniel Ronel, Dec. 25
Toronto, ON • It's been a long struggle for an amazing warrior, but Mason Kay has announced he will be stepping down as the editor-in-chief of TFHN.
After a five month battle with colon cancer, Jay has decided that he needs to "focus on recovering, full time."
He told us, "Is this forever? I don't know. I'd like to say no, that I'll be back once I'm done with this. But honestly, even if I do recover fully, I don't know for sure what I'd do. I have a third child on the way, a little brother to my twin princesses. I've been here since I was a kid. I've been in charge for twelve years. Maybe it's time for someone else to step up to the plate. Maybe I'll return in a smaller capacity. I don't know. But I do know that I have to take a break for now."
While he recovers, senior editor/YGFHL owner/overall badass/yours truly will assume interim editor-in-chief duties. My first order of business was assigning myself the Jay story... mostly to give myself the option of gloating to all the viewers, which I have so far refrained from doing.
In all seriousness, big changes are soon to come. For a few months, I would speak to Jay and senior editor Matt Harkin about changing the dynamic of TFHN; in attempt to gear towards a younger crowd, some of the older members will be let go, replaced with popular, aspiring freelance journalists. In fact, Ronel has put the plan into motion already, hiring Evan Presement to a junior editor and columnist position prior to Jay's retirement.
Who is Evan Presement? Says Ronel: "He's a young, Toronto-based journalist, fresh out of Humber College, gaining some experience working unpaid at the Toronto Star. [sic]
"The thing I like about him is he likes to cover every inch of the game. He recently did a nice piece — on the blog Above the Fold — on the face-off, debunking its importance in possession stats and scoring capabilities. Now, firstly, anything that debunks anything is the right mindset for journalism. Stories of 'lollipops' and 'rainbows' and 'How the Leafs don't actually have a horrible team' and that kind of circle-jerk bullsh-- don't sell. Anger sells. Argument sells. Right off the bat, [Presement] hits you with stats and facts right of the bat, [sic] using War On Ice, which is my bread and butter. The second picture is crowded and hard to understand but his point was that all the data — or rather, most of the data — was bunched up around the middle. He quotes an article from theScore, and his explanation of how the Nashville Predators would win the face-offs and throw the puck off the glass and pray to Christ the forwards would get it; oh, that made me laugh. He compares two cases where his point is very strong, and in the process trashes on one of my least favourite players in Tyler Bozak. He then talks about face-off god Patrice Bergeron, and how his winning of the draws only actually earned the team like three-and-a-half goals last year, or something.
"The only thing I didn't like was his use of Corsi. I've said it a f---ing million times, Corsi and Fenwick are s---. Corsi and Fenwick are hockey's way of pretending the sport has advanced statistics. You look at baseball, the everyday stats are advanced stats. For f---'s sake, batting average is the primary hitting statistic, and it is an advanced statistic. ERA, advanced stat. WHIP, advanced stat. RISP, slugging, walk-to-strikeout, WAR, ISO, runs created, on-base percent, on-base and slugging, Ks per nine, hits per nine, quality start. All advanced stats that are the bread and butter of baseball. Hockey has so few advanced stats; 'analytics', they call them. So you have this punk from Edmonton, who think's he's smart, and he takes all kinds of shots — on goal, blocked, shots wide, shots in the wrong arena, f---ing anything — and he decided to use this as the basis for scoring chances and to measure goalie workload, and then named it after a random coach. Then another blogger — guy named Matt Fenwick — decided that blocked shots were skewing the results, so he took them out and called it Fenwick. Now, I think it's very creative and I think it has some bearing, but it's all intuitive. Who the hell is to say that shot attempts dictate possession? Or time on attack? Or any comparison or percentage? What reasoning is there? Almost always, my coaches implement an attitude of working for a better shot rather than needlessly throwing the puck on net. [Former Head Coach Rod] McLemon had a good strategy to keep the puck for longer while the boys worked towards a better shot. Our shot attempts were garbage, but I would say his teams always were great possession teams. If he came up with a somewhat bearable defensive strategy, he might find himself employed again.
"I will say that the kid [Presement] seems to understand very well what the stats imply, from my conversations with him. I give him the benefit of the doubt for that article because he's using it specifically to help the viewers understand his point."
Note here that Ronel incorrectly credited Presement as working for the Toronto Star. Rather, Presement's internship is with The Sports Network (or TSN). He starts the internship in January 2016. Note as well that Ronel repeats the phrase "right off the bat" in the interview.
Harkin revealed earlier this week that, starting in January, Presement would run a brand new column called Ask Evan, mimicking the wildly popular freelance program "Towpro Type". Run by former TFHN columnist/a--hole Adam Towpro, anybody with a burning hockey question is encouraged to mail their question in, and Towpro provides a response on the next edition. "Ask Evan might seem like a 'Towpro Type' knockoff, but I see it as Towpro is like the beta before we create the final product," says Harkin. "We have a whole team of trusted insider experts behind Presement, with much further inside scoop and far more credible sources. Plus, Evan isn't a d---."
Ronel made one more brief announcement before he and Harkin left the stand: "The Power Rankings will be returning, and I shall be resuming the familiar, inconsistent rate of producing them that everyone seems to love." ∆