from Luke Fox of Sportsnet,
In over a decade of calling Boston Bruins games, Jack Edwards has been called many things: homer, hyper, loud.
Add innovative to that list.
In his spare time, Edwards, 58, has been studying computer code and he has developed his own app to help him with his game calls by organizing lines and other information on players and teams. Now he’s hoping to bring his app to the sports broadcasting world at large.
“I try to put information in a place where I can create easy pathways to it, so I can go from a player on a play-by-play chart, to a bio page, to a directory where I can instantly look up a game Patrice Bergeron played against the Maple Leafs in 2007 because something was ringing in my memory,” he explains....
In a lively hour-long chat, we spoke with Edwards about all things Bruins and broadcasting. The names of Tyler Seguin, Joe Thornton, and even Lance Armstrong are dropped as the play-caller discusses his craft.
Was the Seguin deal worse than the Joe Thornton trade?
Yeah. The problem with Joe is he’s just such a great guy. Even Steve Yzerman, as a player, had an a– h— factor. When Ryan Getzlaf is on his game, he’s nasty. Messier—who wanted to deal with Messier? Teammates didn’t even like him when he had his game face on. We’re talking about a guy who threw Mike Keenan out of the room in the Stanley Cup playoffs.The problem with Joe, he’s just such a nice guy. That feeling pervaded the team to the point where they were universally soft. [Then coach] Mike Sullivan tried every trick he knew—and he knows a lot of them—and Joe was a non-responder. That doesn’t make Joe a bad person. It just means he’s not a leader. They had him in a position of leadership because they thought putting the C on him would turn him into a leader, and they got their thinking totally backwards. Even though they got dimes on the dollar for Joe, they misread the personnel situation.
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