It's Day One of Flyers season, and that means six months (and perhaps one or two more) of watching up to three games a night five nights a week, endlessly scanning Twitter, waiting for those team press releases and frantically trying to crank out all the news, features, columns and historical stuff in a timely manner to beat the competition and give all of you who follow us the scoop whenever and wherever it may occur.
For me, it's Year 15 in sports media, and Year One, Part II flying solo over here at the Phanatic. I've decided to end my run with the good people over at Flyers Faithful after a long, productive 2 1/2 years to concentrate on just one site to keep my ideas fresh and my brain from seizing up from trying to fulfill three different roles at once.
Since the day I was first published here in March of 2007, it's been all about the status and integrity of the major players: Editor John McMullen a former beat writer for the Minnesota Vikings who has held NBA and NFL senior editing posts, along with my own varied credentials over the last decade and a half (just this past season alone four different levels: D-I college, ECHL, AHL and NHL) covering everything from high school hockey on up to your Philadelphia Flyers.
Having spawned the likes of Philadelphia Magazine/97.5 The Fanatic's Tim McManus, we prize in our writing knowledge, creativity, ingenuity, an insider's feel without the condescension, and ability to know when to seize the moment and know when to offer a remedy to the finely dissected angles from the hot topic of the moment.
The Phanatic is determined not to become lost in the endless supermarket of ideas contained in the proliferation of hockey blogs over the past several years begun by some sharp minds whom I hope can parlay their work into something bigger.
We work by acknowledging the inverse relationship that the better the content, the less it needs to be promoted -- because the good stuff will make the rounds to those whose eyes and ears are open to the possibilities of the sports we cover, not just to one corner to which many fans and writers have become accustomed. We're not in it to blindly agree with fellow scribes just for the sake of a Mutual Admiration Society, and we're not in it to be provocateurs for no good reason. There's still a lot of ground to cover in between the extremes which creates room for all sorts of viewpoints and content.
That's where you come in.
Over the course of the 2013-14 season, when you stop by, you'll learn about the Flyers from the ice up to the owner's suite along with team and league history, both distant and recent; find talk about the nuts and bolts and culture of the sport itself that have nothing to do with the intricacies of the salary cap or the vagaries of either side of the stats argument; see game recaps and columns from a variety of writers; hear about top-flight college hockey that's not just limited to the newly-hyped Penn State program, tons of facts and figures and random information you never thought you'd want to know, and find the same quality and quantity of content along with a dose of strong opinions that I've provided as "chief" of the hockey department for the last 5 years.
Remember last Fall and the early part of Winter, when many blogs went silent and you came here for daily and weekly news regarding the lockout plus other engaging posts? Good times. Great times. We flourished then and it allowed us to come on strong once the season got underway. The ball will keep rolling with a full 82-game slate plus playoffs this year.
If you've been following along for a while now, thanks for sticking around. You will be rewarded as you have been for as long as you've flipped over to this slice of hockey heaven with a bright magenta background. If you've glanced over here due to some crossover with FF during my time there, welcome -- we're not mutually exclusive. That cross will be crissed in the course of the upcoming year. If you're new, you'll warm up to us in no time. Tell your friends, tell your enemies, that we're still going strong.
Whether your home is the Delaware Valley, Eastern Canada, Sweden, Russia, Azusa and Cucamonga, spread the word.
Happy hockey days and stay tuned.
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