San Jose Sharks Play-By-Play Announcer Randy Hahn Interview Summary

Here are some miscellaneous tidbits from the interview, including a question he declined to answer.

MJ Kasprzak— There have been rumours that Jarome Iginla wants out of Calgary, and he would seem to be a front-of-net, passionate presence the Sharks have lacked. What do you think the likelihood is of him being moved? And if he is, what's the possibility of him coming to the Sharks? And if so, for whom?

Randy Hahn— I don’t wanna answer questions about rumours.

There were two moments in which I failed to use neutral words that led to rebukes for a loaded question and putting words in his mouth. It was a good learning experience because it was pretty clear that he was well-versed in the pitfalls of doing interviews and wary of how he would be represented.

At one point, I said the Sharks were "outworked" in front of the net because I believe other teams consistently fight harder for that space in the playoffs. However, an experienced reporter does not put his own bias in the question, and the choice of that word was careless.

I also used the phrase "forced to handle" referring to the workload of Evgeni Nabokov. The reality is a better phrase might have been "allowed to handle."

At the same time, Randy was human enough to be guilty of putting words in my mouth by assuming my point was that Nabby had yet to steal a series for the Sharks. In fact, I was doing the right thing in examining his culpability, even though I put our playoff failures completely on the (lack of) offence.

Perhaps the most human moment came at the end of the interview. After over 40 minutes with me, and after answering 11 questions, he said this.

"I got my son standing here waiting for me to give him a ride somewhere. I hate to cut this short, but um, were you just—did—did you have many more questions?"

He patiently waited for my last question which can be seen through this link to my companion piece on Shark-Infested Blogger. This can also be seen in the conclusion of the interview.

MJK: I’ll let you go now so you can take care of family business. Thanks so much for taking time with me .

RH: My pleasure.

MJK: You have a good day.

RH: Thanks for having all the interest, and the—we appreciate the—you know, without the fans we wouldn’t need to have games, right?

MJK: That’s right, and you wouldn’t be making much money either! You take care now.

RH: You, too.

Overall, he was very accessible, thorough and honest. His admission to not being objective on the Sharks was a refreshing level of transparency.

And hey, I got over two weeks of articles out of less than an hour of interview— of course, the transcribing took me 10-plus hours, so I guess the work was the same.