I've Said It Once And I'll Say It Again. Nobody Is Better At What They Do Than Pierre McGuire
Unfortunately the NHL on NBC broadcast team took another hit this week. Eddie Olczyk has already been battling cancer all season so far, and now Pierre McGuire will be sidelined for about a month while he fights prostate cancer. These guys are all #HockeyTough so if you think a little bit of cancer is going to stop them from calling games, you’re out of your damn mind. They’ll drop the gloves, pull cancer’s jersey over its head and start feeding the cancer upper cut after uppercut. No enforcers needed.
But I want to take this time real quick to continue my fight against all the Pierre haters in the world, of which there are many. I don’t want anybody to start thinking that I’m a huge Pierre guy now just because he’s fighting cancer. I’ve been a Pierre guy forever now. Here’s a blog I wrote in 2016 about it.
This take was met with plenty of criticism and backlash 2 years ago. But I’ve been standing strong as a Pierre Guy ever since. And I think that deep down, everybody is a Pierre Guy or a Pierre Girl. The only issue is that you hate Pierre just because you think you’re supposed to hate Pierre. Any time he speaks it’s “Shut up, Pierre” this and “Shut up, Pierre” that. So he knows the name of the man who sold Mitch Marner his first pair of skates and can tell you every youth team he played for and exactly how many minutes he played with the London Knights before making the jump to the Leafs. So he knows the name of the rink where Drew Doughty first learned how to skate and works quotes from Doughty’s peewee coach into the broadcast. Is that really that bad? Has anybody died as a result of Pierre McGuire hitting them with some knowledge? Didn’t think so.
There’s only one group of people who could possibly have a legitimate gripe against Pierre and that would be Hartford Whaler fans. That season with Pierre as the head coach was an absolute disaster. They were never able to recover from that, never made the playoffs again and were shipped down to Carolina about 4 years later. I wouldn’t say Pierre was the sole problem there but I think if you were a Whalers fan back then, you have ever reason to hate everybody who was involved.
Everybody else, though? You don’t get to hate Pierre McGuire just because he’s knowledgable. You don’t get to hate Pierre McGuire just because he’s a real life version of HockeyDB or Elite Prospects or Hockey Reference. Sure, he can be a bit much to handle at times but it’s just because he cares. And I think that everybody will learn during this month that he’s out of the broadcast lineup that a hockey game with Pierre between the benches is always going to be better than a broadcast without him there. No disrespect to Ray Ferraro or anything, I think Ray is a stud as well. It’s just that Pierre was born for the job.
Fuck Cancer.