Well, it happened again Monday morning. For the second time in four months, Simmons made an egregious error in naming one of the players on his hometown team. Not just any team, but a championship team, no less.
The latest error comes in calling Brad Marchand "Andrew" in a tweet.
Simmons tweeted, "Excited that Andrew Marchand confirmed the tattoo misspelling rumor! 'Stanley Cup Champians' is high comedy." For what it's worth, Simmons attached a link to an article on ESPN written by Marchand that had his name all over it.
In a follow-up tweet, Simmons explained: "2 tweets ago: Sorry meant Brad Marchand – Andrew writes for ESPN NY. My brain is going to mush. I called my son by wrong name 2 days ago."
So Simmons called a hockey player, who wrote an article for ESPN, by the name of an actual ESPN writer. It sounds better on the surface than his explanation for the previous mistake, at least.
His first error came in June, when he incorrectly refererred to Rich Peverley as "Patrick Beverley". The article he wrote was in response to some heat he took for being a bandwagon Bruins fan after a picture captured him banging on the glass at TD Garden following Peverley's first goal in Game 4 of the Stanley Cup final.
He later linked to a player profile for Patrick Beverley, a point guard who participated in an NBA summer league with the Miami Heat but never appeared in a regular-season game, via Simmons' twitter account.
Two similar slip-ups in such a short span have caused a bit of a stir.
He again responded to the criticism, lashing out at the bashing by saying, "Wow, Twitter is a tough crowd. I'm gonna have a brainfart tweet once a month, at least. If you can't handle it, you should unfollow."
Simmons, otherwise known as "the sports guy," is a Boston sports homer. His bias juices flow freely in his columns, and he's one of the few writers that not only gets away with it, but makes a living off of it. He loves Boston sports, but has previously stated that he's not a big-time Bruins fan.
Writers make mistakes every day. That's why they have editors. Simmons just happened to make two mistakes about the same team; A team he admittedly doesn't care much about.
