Hockey debates get heated. Especially on the Internet, where everyone muscles up behind their keyboards and say things that would get us punched in the face at a bar. But if there’s a line that shouldn’t be crossed, it appears someone located it and leaped over it in a conversation with Adrian Dater of the Denver Post on Tuesday.
Read from the bottom up:
Dave Tippett, the target of Dater’s snark, is the head coach the Phoenix Coyotes. The “@BabyDocScott” is the account of Scott Schnee, a doctor who works at Banner Health Clinic in Mesa, Arizona.
“Go catch a movie in Aurora” is a reference to the July 20, 2012, mass shooting at a midnight screening of “The Dark Knight Rises” in Aurora, Colorado. “Jessica” is a reference to Jessica Ghawi a.k.a. Redfield, an aspiring hockey writer based near Denver that Dater eulogized on his Denver Post blog.
So yeah … this is pretty deplorable. South Stands Denver has more.
Schnee’s account was soon set to private and then was deleted. KTAR.com and host Peter Burns saved a series of subsequent tweets from the account that indicated it was his way “of telling Dater to drop dead” and that “Colorado as a very soft underbelly.”
KTAR received a statement from Banner Health on the matter:
We are currently gathering details on this situation. Please know that Banner Health takes this matter very seriously, and will provide information, as appropriate.
Look … Dater has the unique ability to get under one’s skin in a debate – Lord knows it’s happened to me before. Coyotes fans are a touchy lot too – Lord knows I’ve seen that vitriol coming back my way, too.
But this isn’t just crossing the line – this is eclipsing it like Matt Duchene on that blown offside goal.
I’d rather not see someone lose their job over an deplorable chirp on the Internet. But I would like to see an apology and a donation to a victims’ fund. Provided, of course, that we don’t end up with another “I was hacked!” mea culpa.