Re: Minnesota Gophers Offesason Thread: Back To 1896
No. I haven't posted consistently here in years. I found the team specific boards to be more interesting than wading through a lot of stupid trash talk here. Anything you've said has been amateur hour compared to the verbal battles that used to take place on this board. That much I'll guarantee you.
If you want to hate because I have developed some relationships w/ people at the U over the years, that's your prerogative. I can't help it if the realities contradict your speculation. My face and name are out there. I'm not hiding behind a message board moniker. If you see me at the rink, feel free to make your feelings known to my face.
I see reasonable speculation on both sides of the issue. Let's face it, neither of us really know the true intent and motive behind his controversial decision, but engaging in subsequent discussions from various perspectives is what this board is designed to facilitate. So unlike what appears to be a reticence on your part for open discussion, I don't see any problem with "hashing out" the details. Most discussions on this board involve varying degrees of speculation. Realistically, questions surrounding these type of extraordinary personal decisions by young college players are best answered through inductive inquiry directly with the source, not by gathering available information through secondary contacts.
I think sometimes your source information is helpful and others have benefited by it, myself included. But I've also seen over the years, that you seem to take your self-perceived role as an "insider" far too seriously at times, especially when source information raises questions about the validity of the public record. In recent years I've noticed you tend to come off your GPL high horse to "bless us" with your presence, and then announce to the fanbase here, "this is reality folks and if you don’t believe it you’re stupid and uninformed". That’s essentially exploiting your “insider track” persona as an ego defense mechanism, rather than demonstrating a temperament conducive for passionate, open and realistic discussion of the issues.
Is it realistic to expect everyone on an open discussion board to acquiesce and buy into your version without question, whether it's true or not? If not, then you'd better be prepared for a heated discussion or stay over on GPL to avoid the inevitable caustic and pretentious rebuttals, and albeit the unpleasant act of interacting with annoying USCHO posters and their "stupid trash talk" again. But then again, the neutered and overly censored environment of GPL elicits it's own emotive constituency of self absorbed, whiny Gopher fans with entitlement issues...doesn't it?
When you make statements like, "If you want to hate because I have developed some relationships w/ people at the U over the years, that's your prerogative", again you're way off base on your "speculation" about my response. I think it’s comical when posters like yourself attempt to make an accurate assessment of what other posters are really like or what they may truly be “feeling” based upon a few lines of script on a discussion board. JFYI, my PhD. training is deep in empirical research, so I enjoy engaging college hockey issues from various research perspectives and offering a bit of theory development as a hobby, but not a lifestyle. So I don't "hate" you or anyone else here because of disagreements over discussions involving college hockey, nor because of whatever contacts you may have at the U.

That’s completely absurd and I couldn’t care less who you know.

I have zero tolerance for childish p*ssing contests.
Nice deflection on the condescending and grandiose visions of yourself as the Supreme USCHO Warrior, but I've also had my share of serious "verbal battles" over the years. From my perspective, a passionate exchange of ideas and verbal battles on USCHO serves to reinforce one important fact: this is a virtual reality environment, not Reality…big “R”. The best advice is not to confuse the two concepts and thus take discussion boards like USCHO too seriously.