Ron MacLean breaks silence on Don Cherry's termination and end of Coach's Corner

They were an institution for millions of Canadian and American hockey fans every weekend during the National Hockey League regular season and continuing into the postseason, but the bridge has been burned and there's no going back. 

The two hosts of Hockey Night in Canada’s Coaches Corner segment in Don Cherry and Ron MacLean are no longer friends with one another after the latter threw the former under the bus for his infamous "you people" comment in November of 2019 with regards to wearing the symbolic poppy to recognize the sacrifice of soldiers in times of war.

“You people that come here,” Cherry said. “You love our way of life, you love our milk and honey, at least you can pay a couple of bucks for a poppy or something like that. These guys paid for your way of life that you enjoy in Canada, these guys paid the biggest price.”

MacLean apologized for Cherry's comment, while Cherry refused to do so and was subsequently terminated. Understandably, the iconic figure known as "Grapes" doesn't see a scenario in which he and MacLean can ever be on good terms with one another again. 

“I don’t think we’ll ever be friends again,” Cherry said last year of MacLean. “You can’t be friends after that. You just can’t… It’s too bad… we used to have fun. It was fun. Coaches Corner was fun.”

And now, MacLean is sharing his side of thing, saying that he believes that even without Cherry's comment, the show might not have lasted that much longer. 

"Grapes was good at reaching his viewer and knowing what they wanted — expert at that — but we are held to a different metric or standard now, and I don't know if we could have made it much longer," MacLean said on the podcast. "So I'm glad Don went out and people aren't that mad at him for what he said. They should be — don't ever get me wrong. You can't project an attitude on people just because of where they're from."

"We were so wrong, and it just needed an apology and it would have been gone; we would have been onward and upward. But people aren't that angry about it. It wasn't the worst thing that's ever been said in the history of humanity, so he kind of went out on top and people miss him and I think that's kind of a nice way to be." 

Which side are you on when it comes to Cherry and MacLean?