RIP OFF ARTIST: NY POST’S NHL WRITER LARRY BROOKS

Larry Brooks is probably the most prominent reporter covering the Rangers these days. He actually does a very good job even though he may not be John Tortorella’s biggest fan (Torts tells him to “get the f*ck out” halfway through the video).  On Monday, Brooks posted a piece that outlined key Rangers that were struggling to score. His reasoning made sense — the only problem is that I had already read “his” points elsewhere.

Now, I can’t confirm that Larry Brooks intentionally plagiarized anything. But the points in his article and one of the posts on HFBoards are startlingly similar. And, OOPS, this isn’t the first time he’s been accused of ripping off a blogger. Late Monday night, a poster on HFBoards put up a thread entitled “Tortorella’s System Cannot Work with this Roster.” Members of the forum went back and forth discussing the merits of Tortorella’s offensive-minded system versus the defensive system Tom Renney had employed as well as the deficiencies of the Rangers’ roster. At 1:28AM on Tuesday December 1st, a user named Inferno272 made a post placing most of the blame on Chris Drury, Ryan Callahan, and Chris Higgins. The point was that these players were all under-performing and that was the Rangers’ primary issue. Here’s the blurb:

Chris Drury, career 25+ goal scorer
Ryan Callahan, scored 20+ goals last year
Chris Higgins, career 20+ goal scorer.

Those 3 you pencil in for 65 goals combined right? Right now they are on pace to score 25 combined goals.

Take 40 goals off the top of any team and I bet you they will look a lot weaker than they actually are. If you can get just those 3 guys going at a very reasonable rate that they have proven over their careers that they can produce at, the Rangers go from the 14th ranked offense to the 2nd ranked offense in the league.

This team has the talent, when you factor in that Gaborik is playing out of his mind, but those 3 guys struggling as they are has really hurt this team.

While I think the Rangers’ problems run much deeper than that, his logic isn’t completely off-base. Inferno272 later re-wrote his argument and posted it on his blog at 3:00 AM. Apparently, Larry Brooks agreed with the HFBoards poster. The New York Post writer put up an amazingly congruent argument the afternoon of December 1st. Here’s what Larry Brooks had to say:

Chris Drury scored 22 goals a year ago in a bad season. Ryan Callahan scored 24 with a late-season rush under John Tortorella. Christopher Higgins scored 12 in 57 games for the dysfunctional Canadiens after averaging 24 per the previous three seasons.

As such, it was not unrealistic to project 25 goals apiece from Drury and Callahan and 20 from Higgins playing under John Tortorella’s attack philosophy. That would register as a sum of 70 goals.

Now, though, one-third of the way through the season, the three forwards have combined to score the grand sum of eight goals—four from Callahan, two apiece from Drury and Higgins.

Eight in a collective 75 games from the trio that opened the season as the Blueshirts’ second line. Good grief.

It’s doubtful that Inferno272 is actually Larry Brooks’ internet handle. Maybe it’s possible that Brooks coincidentally came up with the same bullet points a few hours after they were posted on a fan forum and a blog. However, it seems more likely that Brooks saw the stats and decided to write about them for the Post. Note that he even lists the players in the SAME ORDER as the blogger. Sure, he has to come up with new material on a daily basis, but he’s also a paid professional. It seems pretty inexcusable for a “legitimate” writer to lift from an unpaid blogger — especially without citing Inferno272.  I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether it was intentional or not.