We present to you a new series explaining exactly why particular members of the Boston Bruins are the absolute worst, in no particular order:
The Boston Bruins are a truly amazing hockey team. Who else could offload a right-wing nutjob loon like Tim Thomas and still remain the least-likable team in the NHL? That takes true dedication to amassing as many outright jerks as humanly possible to complete a roster while also remaining competitive.
You could pile up an entire team of Zach Stortinis and Raffi Torreses and 2009 Matt Cookes, and your team would be fairly bad, but to win a Stanley Cup with this many genuinely disagreeable people is truly an accomplishment. Peter Chiarelli should be extremely proud of himself. Picking the least-likable Bruins isn't an easy task, simply because there are so, so many to choose from. However, there's a very clear jumping-off point.
The most obvious member of the Bruins who is beneath human contempt is casual homophobe and alleged lock to play Pigpen in the live action Peanuts movie: Tyler Seguin. Not that anyone on the planet should like the kind of bro-ism that has long been Seguin's hallmark, but, we're told, it's a product of his being young, absurdly talented, and rich in a city that has cared very deeply as hockey as far back as May 2011.
We were all dirtbags at 20 and 21, admittedly, and if we had the kind of walking-around money Seguin does, we'd be in the same boat. Except that when we were 20 and 21 we didn't allegedly live in squalor, and we weren't so dumb we had to tattoo our own last names on our arms, presumably in case we ever forgot.
But what makes Seguin particularly detestable is his use of Twitter. From the time he tweeted a picture of a girl labeled "Dont [sic] Text Her Bro!" in his phone to last week when he said he got goosebumps from a video "no homo," he has routinely underscored exactly why no one on earth should be allowed to use social media.
The girl issue, I mean, we've all been there, though perhaps we didn't make that girl the butt of a joke for hundreds of thousands of followers to laugh at. But the "no homo" thing is obviously unforgivable now, in 2013. That this was dismissed as a "teachable moment" or something similar from so many people, including some people who should really know better and the media, is not surprising, because it all harkened back to that whole "Well he's only 21!" thing but here's what it says about Seguin as a person: He is still very much casually homophobic because if he was dumb enough to tweet "no homo," then he almost certainly thinks stuff at least as bad, and probably worse.
Oh but gee whiz he felt so bad about it, huh? Apologized right away — once everyone yelled at him about it and not because he actually felt bad — and then sat down with Patrick Burke and the You Can Play people about why that kind of language is not acceptable. (Of course, he only did that because, per the NHL and NHLPA's new rules, he has to.) Now he's going to be involved with You Can Play this summer, which is great. Or it would be if he didn't try to write this off, even after the fact, as just boys being boys and an error in judgment with regard to the tweet because he needs to be more careful sending that stuff out to 250,000-plus people.
But he did, which shows just how little he's learned. Hey, he's only 21. That's when we all arrived at decisions that were the exact opposite of the point.