TSN (A Canadian Sports Network) Tweets About Vezina Favorites And Leaves Out Connor Hellebuyck (A Goalie On A Canadian Team)

Now that the NHL has decided (maybe) that the 2019-20 regular season is done and dusted, expect to see not just talk about future playoff matchups, but also award talk and speculation.

For Jets fans, that means we’ll hear plenty of how @Connor Hellebuyck deserves the Vezina trophy and maybe even warrants some talk about the NHL’s MVP award.

But in what may be a bad omen going forward for fans who fear that playing in Winnipeg will cause Helle to be overlooked, BarDown.com – a sports culture website produced by TSN – posted the following graphic to kick off talk about who could win this year’s Vezina Trophy as the league’s best goaltender.

While I credit to the BarDown crew for using a picture of my grandmother’s tablecloth as the background to this image, the only thing more awful than the font they used for this graphic, was the omission of Hellebuyck.

You’d think the person (or persons) running social media for a site “powered by” a Canadian sports network would go out of their way to feature… ya know…. a goalie on a Canadian hockey team who is a legitimate contender for the award.

And not just any Canadian team mind you, but one of the few teams that the network broadcasts regularly. Again, you’d think they would go out of their way to wave the flag for a team under their umbrella that happens to play in one of the two major hockey arenas that having naming rights owned by Bell Canada, who also own TSN.

This tweet feels like the equivalent of having a wide open net to shoot a puck into, only to blow it in epic fashion. The obvious choice was right in front of them and somehow they missed.

Reactions to a Canadian sports website leaving off the man who many feel is the front runner for the award, were rather predictable and it just wasn’t Jets fans who reacted…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If nothing else, TSN can hang their hat on their tweet doing some numbers. More people reacted to this single tweet than all of the 22 other tweets BarDown posted yesterday combined, so in that regard it’s a social media win, even if the engagement makes them look rather silly.

Besides, leaving Hellebuyck out of the Vezina talk wasn’t even the worst omission TSN’s Social Media has had this week.

Earlier this week they asked if Alphonso Davies is “greatest Canadian soccer player ever” which is a strange question to ask when Christine Freakin’ Sinclair exists.

Maybe the TSN social media team can spend the rest of quarantine watching over footage from past TSN covered events to jog their memories.