Mendes: A little context to Gryba’s ‘blood’ quote

Senators defenceman Eric Gryba said Wednesday, “We can smell blood. We can taste blood. And it’s time to put them away.”

Twitter provides us with instantaneous sports news at our finger tips 24/7.

On Tuesday night, for example, I learned that J.A. Happ was hit in the face with a line drive, that Marc-Andre Fleury was imploding and that Brent Burns opened the scoring in San Jose.

I didn’t witness any of these events with my own eyes, but I trusted they actually happened because Twitter said they did.

While the platform is great for passing along timely information, it rarely provides us with any meaningful context. And I got another great reminder of that on Wednesday afternoon.

I tweeted out a quote from Senators defenceman Eric Gryba who told me, “We can smell blood. We can taste blood. And it’s time to put them away.”

Immediately, this quote caught fire on Twitter. People quickly connected the comment with the incident involving Gryba and Lars Eller from last week, which left the Canadiens defenceman injured on the ice.

I received a backlash of nasty and hate-filled notes directed towards Gryba. Here is a small sample of what was in my Twitter mentions today — and trust me, I had to edit out the ones that were unfit for print:

But as you can see in the video clip that runs along with this blog, there is no malice or ill-will from Gryba when he’s speaking. He’s clearly answering a question only about needing to finish off the Habs in Game 5 on Thursday night. The Eller incident is not on his radar because I didn’t bring it up in my line of questioning. There is no correlation to what Gryba said today and to what happened last week. I had a lengthy debate with our producers back in Toronto on how we were going to handle this video clip in our news show tonight. I made it very clear that we should not show the Eller hit, the blood and then run this clip. In my opinion, it’s irresponsible journalism to connect the two incidents.

If you want to suggest it was in bad taste by Gryba, that’s fine. But you should watch the entire clip before jumping to conclusions on Twitter. And that’s why I wanted to post this blog today with the video clip; it’s important you see the entire picture. This is a player who is talking about finishing off an opponent in a playoff series — nothing more, nothing less. If you look at this objectively — which is hard for certain people — you will see that Gryba is merely talking about Game 5 in this quote.

I always make it a point to tweet out one or two quotes from players every day. Today, for example, I also tweeted out quotes from Craig Anderson on not being a Vezina finalist and Paul MacLean on being “scared to death” about Game 5 in Montreal.

Last night in the dressing room, Cory Conacher gave me great quote about how the hockey gods were on Ottawa’s side. So naturally, I tweeted it right away.

But this incident with Gryba has me re-thinking that approach. Quotes without any context can be extremely dangerous on Twitter. You only have 140 characters to play with it, so it’s hard to even fit in a full quote — let alone provide any additional background information that goes along with it. I tried to explain in a follow-up tweet that Gryba was merely talking about having a killer instinct for Game 5. But at that point, the train had left the station and it was too late.

And that is the dangerous thing about Twitter and this instant news world of ours. As journalists, we are so obsessed with generating content that we often forget to provide the context to go along with it.

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