Yesterday morning, before news of the Travis Konecny extension broke and before the Flyers’ first preseason contest against the New York Islanders, fans were notedly excited after the official Flyers twitter account posted this video:
— Philadelphia Flyers (@NHLFlyers) September 16, 2019
As I stated before, Travis Konecny was still without contract, and many fans were becoming increasingly irritated that a contact had not been signed yet. Ultimately, the video was indeed a tease of Konecny’s six year, $5.5 million AAV deal. However, shortly after the news broke, some started to notice unusual activity coming from the Flyers’ social media accounts:
The account steadily tweeted “we signed TK and Provy” at what seems like any human being who said anything about the lack of a contract for the pair. The Flyers’ account then tweeted out a video with the following message:
TFW you don’t have to read “sign TK” tweets from Twitter GMs anymore. pic.twitter.com/4Ag00bXyIg
— Philadelphia Flyers (@NHLFlyers) September 16, 2019
Yeah, this was annoying, and it’s annoying for a couple of reasons. The first and foremost is that the term “Twitter GMs” is both insulting to passionate fans that care and dismissive of the fact that two of the biggest pieces to this club were without a contract until a couple of days ago. Yes, sure, waiting until late (if this was indeed the case) creates drama that perhaps the team was feeding off of for attention, but personally I think that this is a cheap tactic. In the case of Provorov, his was a tougher negotiation and waiting until the other shoe dropped with RFA defensemen was important. However, with Konecny, his deal didn’t seem more complicated than offering it to him in the first place.
Additionally, there is the “are you kidding me?” factor in the whole scenario. Tweeting at literally everybody is certainly a tactic, but was this really at all necessary? No. It was not. In the end, it simply comes off as petty and patronizing towards caring fans who want this team to do more than simply lose in the first round of the playoffs. With a marketing team who’ve just dished out the slogan “Fly or Die”, they clearly understand how dedicated we all are towards this hockey team, the hockey team the Flyers. So, that’s why I really don’t get this whole twitter (and partially instagram) barrage of activity.
But it’s okay, because I don’t know if you know, but we signed TK and Provy.
