In NHL trade news, the LA Kings traded goalie Ben Scrivens to the Edmonton Oilers for a third round draft pick this week. In TWITTER EXPLOSION news, Scrivens launched a social media barrage at one Canadian sportswriter for sharing a bevy of his wife's tweets on the topic of moving from Los Angeles to Canada. That's what I love about this business, not a day goes by that you don't see something new.
A player getting mad at a sportswriter isn't anything earth-shattering, but Scrivens' Twitter rant aimed at Anthony Vasquez-Peddie of Canoe.ca is one of the strangest cases in recent memory….
First, we have to turn our attention to the article that started this controversy, if you could even call it that. Vasquez-Peddie compiled several tweets from Jenny Scrivens about her affinity for the warm weather of Southern California under the headline: "Big loser in Oilers-Kings trade? Mrs. Scrivens."
Winters here are so tough… #HermosaBeach pic.twitter.com/vtSWKXCQPv
— Jenny Scrivens (@JenScrivs) December 16, 2013
He wrote the following to accompany the tweets:
"Jenny couldn’t have been happier after her husband was traded to the Kings last off-season after spending three years in Toronto with the Maple Leafs. Now that she’s headed back to the Great White North, however, she has to deal with awful things like fall, snow and ice."
The article is irreverent to the brink of complete and utter pointlessness, but falls in the wheelhouse of the kind of content that is flooding the internet these days. Attractive hockey WAG moves from warm weather to cold weather, let's chuckle at her Instagram photos in SoCal and the fact that she's going to need to wear an overcoat and mittens. Har har. It's hardly anything noteworthy, let alone something that should draw more than 20 seconds of anyone's attention.
That is until Scrivens found out about the article and took offense to the attention drawn to his wife's tweets and the reaction to them. Scrivens called Vasquez-Peddie "gutless" and also destroyed fans who were somehow, stupidly, bashing his wife. Edmonton and Ben Scrivens are definitely getting off on the wrong foot.
Vasquez-Peddie responded in full on his Twitter page and addressed Scrivens' Twitter rant directly with this tweet…
Hi @scrivens_30. It was a tongue-in-cheek blog. Not an attack. The weather in Canada kind of sucks compared to L.A.
— Tony Vasquez-Peddie (@AVPreports) January 17, 2014
That five tweet fury seems like an overreaction from Scrivens, doesn't it? It's not like Vasquez-Peddie painted his wife as some kind of monster out to destroy the city of Edmonton and the Canadian ecosystem with a flamethrower. He published a few tweets from a public forum that were innocuous in nature. I didn't see anything outwardly mean-spirited. He even called her a "champ." Hopefully no rational person would read that and think that it was a critique of Jenny Scrivens in any way, but alas, there's a fringe of sports fans obsessed with regionalism and tribalism that doesn't believe in rationalism.
Believe it or not, the first comment on the Canoe.ca article from a chap named Danny Sorgini is, I kid you not…
"That’s what you get when you merry an idiot."
The internet, ladies and gentlemen!
Everyone here would probably benefit from chillaxing a little bit. Scrivens, Edmonton hockey fans, irrational commenters who can't spell, cold weather enthusiasts, and the people calling Vasquez-Peddie a "classless f*ck."
As if this story couldn't get any more ridiculous, and I'm not sure that's even possible at this point, it appears that Scivens' anger is directed at a secondary source. You see, Vasquez-Peddie took the article concept from the Sporting News, where Sean Gentille first published a collection of Jenny Scrivens' tweets along with an analysis of the trade. Vasquez-Peddie credited Sporting News in aggregating the content (if you could call it aggregating, it's basically re-publishing the same content), but it's downright comical that Scrivens would blast Vasquez-Peddie and say nothing about Gentille, who published the tweets in the first place!
For his part, Gentille had pretty much the best reaction possible to this absurd controversy and his role safely outside the fray…
*nonchalantly whistles*
— Sean Gentille (@seangentille) January 17, 2014
And that perfectly summarizes one of the weirder sportswriter-athlete beefs in recent times. Meanwhile, it's time for me to cross "irreverent compilation of tweets about moving to a colder climate" off the Good AA Ideas list before someone throws a brick through my window.
