Last summer, the Philadelphia Flyers made a pre-draft trade that “brought home” right-handed defenseman Anthony “Tony” DeAngelo. It was a controversial move, as any move involving the Sewell-born former first rounder has been, mostly because of his checkered past of locker room issues, his seemingly casual racism, and his very vocal support of then-president Donald Trump.
For 22 weeks in late 2020, DeAngelo hosted a podcast called Watch Your Tone where he and three friends discussed all sports, interviewed guests, and read mean tweets about himself. Male pro hockey players are pretty buttoned up guys, especially at the NHL level, so it’s pretty rare that there’s enough content out there that would really allow you to get to know a player. Most of the time, it’s canned answers in a presser or friendly interview or it’s their significant others’ Instagram posts instead of anything off-the-cuff or too in-depth. So when the Flyers acquired this player, I figured I would tune in and check out some episodes of Watch Your Tone. It’s taken me a little while longer than I anticipated, but I did get through all of the episodes on Spotify. Plus, now there’s a chance that he’ll be spending a second season in Philadelphia despite an up-and-down year with a fairly-solid 42 points in 70 games that came with various healthy scratches.
The podcast is essentially Tony and some of his buddies from this area talking about sports. They talk a lot about hockey, but it runs the whole gamut. DeAngelo definitely fancies himself a sportscaster type—which is only inflamed in Episode 2 when Kenny Albert tells him that he and Wayne Gretzky are the athletes he always thought could host a sports talk show. DeAngelo does bring some semi-professional presence to the discussion, but his group of boys—which includes his brother—leave a lot to be desired. As a result, the show sort of walks the line between highly-structured professional podcast and casual chit-chat between people with good banter, only if those people didn’t have good banter (or know what the word “banter” means).
For instance, Tony and the boys love to get on their soapbox about criticism from fans and from professional journalists—”you can’t talk if you can’t play” is the general philosophy. At no point, though, do any of them reckon with the fact that Tony is the only pro athlete on the podcast, meaning that when the other guys levy any kind of critique on athletes (which is what the entire podcast is) they are falling into one of those two categories. If they don’t consider themselves fans and they don’t consider themselves journalists, then maybe I’m not giving them enough credit in the self-awareness department and they actually consider themselves exactly what they are, which is a bunch of dudes who happen to be friends with a professional athlete.
There’s also a good amount of focus on gambling, mostly advice on games and different fights that I have no idea how it panned out because I’m not going to look up week-to-week NFL scores or MMA results from three years ago. They’re definitely big into combat sports—boxing, MMA, etc.—and even have a professional boxer (Tony’s cousin) on as a guest at one point. In fact, they definitely rival football for the second most focused-on sport on Watch Your Tone.
I also dug into Tony’s appearance on the Cam and Strick Podcast that he made when he was first trade-signed by the Flyers this offseason. While he did not get into much of his spotted past on his own podcast, they asked him about it directly, and he kind of talked around the incident, saying that the junior team he was on at the time was “a terrible team” and “there were a lot of arguments”, he still wanted to win every game, and even though they didn’t have a chance, “I was still treating every game as if it was game 7 of a playoff series.” He says “the frustration builds, there’s other guys, competitors, on the team … and they show it in different ways but I got into a little argument there and I said something to him that I shouldn’t have said and I regretted it.”
His biggest beef here is that it ever left the locker room and made its way to the higher-ups in the league: “In my opinion it should have been a team matter, there was consequences to pay for whether it was through the team or through the league, it just so happened that it went through the league and became a little bit bigger of a topic where if it was with the team it would’ve been a little more quiet, you know not all these statements.”
He goes on to say that he was friends with the guy afterwards and they even played in a 3-on-3 tournament the next summer. Really the biggest gripe he had was all the consequences he had to face—he complains about the statements he had to make, the fact that it was in his draft year and potentially affected his draft stock, etc. etc.
I think because of his Twitter shenanigans during the 2020 election, I had just assumed that Tony was one of these guys whose entire personality is Donald Trump and who can’t have a single conversation without it revolving around politics or snowflakes or cartels or whatever.
And maybe he is outside of the semi-professional confines of a recorded podcast. But my ultimate conclusion here is that Tony DeAngelo is basically someone that we all know. We’ve met him at tailgates or in Passyunk bars or as the friend of a friend at a bachelor party. You might have a good time talking sports with him or you might be able to tolerate him around a mini George Foreman grill. But you also know that you’d never be friends with that guy.
The sad, sad, sad fact is that this categorization puts him in line with probably more than half of NHL players, staff, and a good percentage of fans, too. He’s just in a much smaller category in terms of making it known.
Some random TDA insights:
- According to his friends, if Tony was mic’d up for a playoff game, they’d have to bleep the whole game
- Tony throws his clubs when he golfs (no surprise there)
- Tony does not know what a DeLorean is (kind of surprising)
- His style is Adidas track suit with white v-neck underneath (I mean, duh, South Philly Italian so…duh)
- Tony on analytics in hockey: “I don’t think they’re bad by any means. 1) I don’t believe they’re the end-all. You might as well just put robots on the field. 2) I trust a GM, a scout, a department over a computer system. I think the eye test is more important than analytics.”
- While talking about what sport would you most want to make the winning play of a game 7—buzzer beater, overtime goal, walkoff homerun, or touchdown—Tony picks hockey and says, “Obviously, because when you’re in a position where you may actually have a chance to do it someday, you gotta pick it.” I have some unfortunate news for him: he’s on the Philadelphia Flyers, so it might be quite a while, if ever, before he’s in that position.
- Tony’s picks for the best sports movies are Miracle (2004) at no. 1 and Beer League (2006) at no. 2.
- He’d let Mike Tyson punch him in the face for a million dollars (he does not bring up that his salary is more than that).
- His favorite player ever is Chris Pronger.
Kismet:
- “They’re always telling me ‘come home, come home,’ but I’m not coming home, I’d like to stay in New York. I’m still a huge Eagles fan, huge Phillies fan. That’s not gonna change, I catch a lot of shit for that. But Flyers-wise, the day they didn’t draft me in the ‘14 draft I was done with them. It’s all about the Rangers now.”
- DeAngelo picked John Tortorella for the 2020 Jack Adams Award, noting that he is “the only Italian coach in the league.”
- Tony picks Mat Barzal over then-future, now-past teammate Sebastian Aho in a “Barzal or Aho” discussion.
Miscellany:
- Colby Cohen told a story about being a semi-black ace for the Bruins during their cup run in 2011, basically doing all the workouts and the practices and traveling with the team but never actually playing. The cool tidbit was that once they won, he and the other undressed guys on the roster were hustled down to the locker room to get their gear on so they could be on the ice for the celebration—a missive that he later learned came directly from Zdeno Chara and Mark Recchi.
- Sean Avery is a huge grump who says he started his podcast so he’d have a place to long-form defend himself whenever cancel culture comes for him. Surprise! He’s kind of the worst.
