from Brad Kelly at DurhamRegion.com,

Q. It’s often been said hockey players are the best professional athletes to deal with, is that what you have found? What separates them from other sports?

I’ve covered baseball, football, I haven’t done much in the way of basketball other than hosting some NBA stuff for CTV in the early days. I guess it comes back to being Canadian. I know it’s a very biased way of looking at things. It changes year by year. This year at the draft we saw so many American kids drafted. You’ll see a lot more next year too. As I grew up in the business, I rode the bus with the Brandon Wheat Kings in the late 80s and early 90s. On the bus were guys like Kevin Cheveldayoff, who’s now the general manager of the Winnipeg Jets. Wade Redden who had a very good NHL career. Chris Dingman who won a couple of Stanley Cups and is still in Tampa Bay. And on and on it goes. You forge relationships with those guys because you are like-minded. Not because you are associated with the sport of hockey. They’re good people and as long as you approach your business fairly and accurately, I think you are going to connect. I always found that to be the case in hockey in grassroots level all the way up to the NHL.

Q. How has social media changed the way you do your job?

In a couple of ways. From a positive perspective, obviously you can break information now through social media immediately. I look at Bob McKenzie as the pioneer of hockey insiders. He is and was somebody I always looked up to. He kind of blazed the trail for guys like me to come up through the ranks. We would break our stories on radio or various websites and that was how we did our business. That’s how we built our brand. And then Twitter was introduced. I was one of the first ones on Twitter at TSN. It was shocking to me how quickly the followers grew. Literally in one day I had 4,000 followers....

more