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Monday, December 29, 2008

All-Star Game Voting is "a total joke"

From Puck Daddy on Yahoo! Sports today:

"As of 6:42 p.m. EST on Monday night, the Stanley Cup champion Detroit Red Wings are under 10,000 votes for Scott Niedermayer away from not having a single representative in a starting position in the NHL All-Star Game. Not that this would make the ASG voting a total joke or anything, being that it already is. Help them Nicklas Lidstrom ... you're their only hope"


There are a few things I noticed while looking at the voting results today:

- Jean-Sebastien Giguere is now the leading goaltender in the Western Conference. Miikka Kiprusoff, Evgeni Nabokov and Niklas Backstrom all have better goaltender statistics than him in the west. Nabokov is currently third in votes among Western Conference goaltenders. Backstrom is a distant fifth. Kiprusoff currently has about 76,000 votes, more than 400,000 less than Giguere.

- Alexander Ovechkin, who is currently third in league scoring and second in goal scoring, is almost 580,000 votes away from being voted into the game. Jeff Carter and Thomas Vanek, who are currently competing with Ovechkin for the goal scoring lead, are nowhere near the top ten in Eastern Conference forwards.

- Sergei Gonchar, who has not played a game all season, is currently in second place amongst Eastern Conference defensemen. He is about 45,000 votes away from leading that group. Ryan Whitney, who has played three games this year, has a commanding grip on fourth place.

- The San Jose Sharks and Boston Bruins, who are currently leading the Western and Eastern Conferences respectively, do not have any players close to being voted into the game.

Boycott the NHL All-Star Game.

2 comments:

Pratt said...

I couldn't agree more. The NHL's marketing and management group continues to let us fans down and lead us to believe that the NHL is secretly run by the Ford family and the rest of the Detroit Lions organization.

Anonymous said...

We're Bruins' season ticket holders who are among the most tolerant and friendly towards the many Habs fans who always come to the Garden to support their team, but it's going to be hard to stomach them next week, given how they've ruined the all-star game.

What's worse is that it's clear, from reading their forums, that many of them aren't embarrassed by this.

Well I'm embarrassed for them, and for hockey. The all star game is supposed to be the league's showcase for the best players. Where are the Red Wings? Where are the Sharks? Where are the Caps? And yes, where the hell are the Bruins -- many of whom are among the lead leaders in all categories.

I've always defended Habs fans as great fans of the game, and this is a slap in the face. They've ruined the all-star game and they know enough about hockey to know it.

And, sad to say, the NHL has once again managed to make itself clownish in the eyes of the sporting world. It's not like other leagues haven't had to deal with this sort of thing before; the NHL didn't have to reinvent the wheel, they just had to get their heads out of their butts and pay attention.

It's an embarrassment and a disgrace.