Quote:
Originally Posted by FanIn80
I never really thought the Pelletier thing was a big deal. I always took it as Sutter just saying, "why are you asking about a guy that only played 7 minutes and had one shot on goal." Kind of sarcastically saying... "who? what's his number again?" And then the "he's only 21, still has a long way to go" part was saying "relax, he's young, let him play some more before you start asking about him."
Then again, I'm from a different era I guess. It's probably a by-product of people growing up in a world where most communication happens via text or messages instead of talking. Like it seems younger people interperet things in a much more literal sense than what was often intended. Try watching youtube vidoes of people in their 20s listening and reacting to songs from the 70s and 80s. They're like, "I don't understand why this guy is talking about selling his soul though. Like no way am I ever doing that. You only get one soul! Why would sell that?!" It's like, "relax homie, nobody's out here literally trying to sell a soul. It was just a figure of speech that was meant to sound poetic or as a way of saying... yadda yadda yadda..."
Anyway, I've digressed, but that Pelletier thing always stood out to me as like... come on man, he obviously didn't mean it literally. He knows who the kid is, he's just trying to protect him for you guys writing crap every day about his progress (or lack of).
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From everything I've heard about this incident, it wasn't so much that Pelletier was hurt by this comment but the rest of the team was hurt by what they saw was unprofessional treatment of him by Sutter.
If you are on a team and a new, cheerful, happy young guy joins the team and gets publicaly dumped on by the boss, you want to stick up for the guy.
I also heard from insiders that everyone from players to coaching and front office staff were pissed off by Sutter's treatment of Pelletier's parents. Tre brought him up from the farm and everyone kept asking when his first game would be so they could schedule the parents to come be at the game and Sutter kept giving non-answers and jerking the family around because he was either playing his mind-games or didn't want to play him at all.
Finally someone up top said "what are we doing here" and then Sutter played him and they got his family in to see his first game but just to get back at his hand being forced, he developed that grouchy attitude that led to the dismissive press conference about Pelletier and maybe some other incidents.