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Ah yes, it’s that time of year again. The ground is hard, the grass is white… and stupid ass bloviators are bashing Philadelphia. Not surprsingly, this one is of the Yinzer variety.

Meet Dejan Kovacevic, a longtime “award-winning” columnist from the Yellow City who left his “handsomely [paying]” job at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (there’s an oxymoron) to start DK on Pittsburgh Sports, an impressive, if not familiar looking independent website where Kovacevic charges $24 per year to read his musings… which apparently include nonsensical videos in which Dejan (is that the spicy kind?) tells all of his steel-dust-covered brethren about the time that the mean Eastern PA people threw snow balls at lovable Santa Claus. And, bonus!, the video includes a cameo from longtime Pittsburgh resident Tim Panaccio, who for some reason said that most Flyers fans – a subsection of whom Panaccio calls the “troubled” people who live in Philly – who go to games now weren’t around for the Lindros era and have a hard time appreciating it. Wait, what?

If that video (and still of Panotch) wasn’t enough to turn your stomach, here’s more from Kovacevic:

I won’t even care, as I heard in the corridors closer to midnight, that all this mayhem wrought by the Flyers, the most repugnant franchise in professional sports with all due apologies to Bill Belichick’sPatriots, was essentially orchestrated. That after a 7-4 slaughter Monday on Long Island, Claude Giroux and a few of his mates met at a local steakhouse and decided this night, this opponent would make the perfect foil for turning their season around. That they’d go out and do that thing they’ve always done, 40 years after it last worked, and raise a circus tent over the proceedings.

Well, mission accomplished in that regard. More on that later.

The word butthurt doesn’t even begin to describe what I just read.

That mindset won’t satisfy most fans. I get that. From birth, a Pittsburgh hockey fan sees red when he or she sees orange. And that only multiplies when a borderline criminal like Zac Rinaldo flagrantly charges Kris Letang from behind, as happened in the first period, and knocks Letang from the game. Johnston said doctors performed concussion tests and chose to remove him.

But they didn’t. And that mindset, like it or not, is what wins in playoffs. Not the garbage in which the Penguins have engaged far too often over the years. They aren’t that team, so they shouldn’t try to be that team. They’re a puck-possession team with exceptional skill at center and a system built to capitalize on both. Chasing the irrelevant likes of Rinaldo around the rink achieves nothing.

Well… he’s not wrong about Rinaldo. At some point the Type OBs have to come around on Rinaldo being a useless thug. Travis Hughes has. But for Kovacevic to pretend like the Flyers are solely to blame for the extracurriculars between the two teams is absurd. Do we forget Game 3, 2012?

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I’m all for skewering the Flyers for their archaic ways, but if there’s one team that they actually work against – one team that gets knocked off their game by that stuff – it’s the Penguins. So while we’ll agree to disagree with Kovacevic on the fisticuffs, there’s no excusing that video… particularly the tone-deaf appearance by hardened grandpa Tim Panaccio.

*I actually really admire what this guy is doing. It’s a good-looking site– very readable and approachable. Don’t like the sort of narcissist who puts their own image and “award-winning” in the header (imagine the comments if I had my picture at the top of the site…), and not so sure about the flavor of the content… but I wish more experienced scriptuals would do this sort of thing. I’d absolutely pay $24 per year** to subscribe to, say, Tim McManus’ Eagles coverage. 

**We’re tossing around something like this for people who want to 1) bypass the surveys and 2) support what we’re doing here. Everything else would remain the same– it would just be an option.

H/T to reader Bernard