some background on terry pegula from bucky gleason

terry pegula

buffalo news columnist bucky gleason worked the phones for some background info on potential sabres buyer terry pegula...overall a very good piece with pegula coming off as a "buffalo kind of guy"...

sure looks that way as gleason has his sources use words like, "honest," "blue-collar," "down-to-earth," and "loyal"...one source says that "people will identify with him up [in buffalo]"...nice...

it's a long piece, that is hopeful, exuberant, and very optimistic...but, as with bucky, there always seems to be an opinionated poke at management, and here's how he slides it in...throughout the piece he uses quotes from his sources, yet in this paragraph, there's nothing that denotes a quote from either his sources or from pegula himself:

"He was upset when Chris Drury and Daniel Briere left the organization. He couldn't comprehend how the team let Henrik Tallinder get away because he wanted a four-year contract rather than the three-year deal it offered."

the drury/briere thing has been a constant for gleason as he berates management for its utter failure in this matter...and that's fine...but to say that the potential new owner was "upset" with the way it was handled and then to follow up with how "he couldn't comprehend" the hank tallinder situation without attributing it to a source is somewhat underhanded...it's a slick way to interject his opinion and have it become part of the background of the subject...

i brought this up during his chat yesterday and asked him to clarify and his rebuttal was, "No, I don't care to clarify. What I wrote was accurate."

what he wrote (and writes) has an influence upon his immediate audience in the buffalo area as well as a national audience as the sale of a professional franchise is national sports/business news...jerry sullivan on the howard simon show this morning said, concerning pegula, "just to have a guy like that who would be a fan...and is, like concerned that they, he agrees with me that they [inaudible] signed tallinder was a bad idea."

so pegula agrees with sullivan and gleason and we're to believe this because what gleason wrote was "accurate" even though no source was named?...

i've seen bucky do this before and i don't buy what he's selling...stick to the facts, bucky, and don't put words in other peoples mouths, no matter how disdainful you are of management or how much your ego needs to be fed...it ain't right