Dallas Eakins, Defender Of Critics

From Mirtle's article on hockey shifting from "seen him", guts and small sample sizes to a real, quantitative approach:

"I heard through the grapevine [during the year] he was being highly critical of our team," Oilers head coach Dallas Eakins said on Tuesday. "That didn’t bother me. I’m like, ‘How can he not be highly critical of our team? We’re in 28th place.’ So of course he was."

The second significant criticism (the first being that numbers had no place in hockey) levied at the quant critics of the Edmonton Oilers over the last eight years revolved around writers who were far "too negative", in their words, judgements and projections of the team.  That there was value in being positive rather than truthful (I've referred to those folks as "brightsiders" for awhile now) always seemed childlike to me and it's refreshing to see that a ranking member of the organization sees it the same way.