Finally, something seemed to be going right for the National Hockey League. Despite flagging attendance and abysmal television ratings, the league was headed into next week's midseason break on a wave of positive publicity. For the first time in, well, maybe forever, people seemed excited about the league's annual All-Star Game.
The big story of this year's contest began with a single fan—22-year-old Steve Schmid of upstate New York. Schmid decided that it would be neat to see a hard-working journeyman get voted into the All-Star Game. He chose the Vancouver Canucks' Rory Fitzpatrick, an unremarkable player without much talent or flashy stats—in hockey terms, a grinder. The "Vote for Rory" movement took off soon after All-Star voting began in late November. Media outlets picked up the story a few weeks later, when the Vancouver players took their morning skate in "Vote for Rory" T-shirts. Rory supporters started posting clever campaign ads on YouTube, and by early December he'd been written about in USA Today, the New York Times, and Sports Illustrated.
Of course not all of the hockey establishment was happy about such things:
The press played up Rory-mania as a grass-roots movement to change the league. But a bunch of league stalwarts lashed out at the campaign. On the CBC's Hockey Night, Don Cherry called the whole thing a joke: "Rory, if you're watching, they're not laughing with you, they're laughing at you." On the Fox News-style Hockeycentral Panel, one commentator described Rory-voters as a bunch of "computer geeks." Wayne Gretzky suggested that the league intervene to save the All-Star Game. ESPN's Barry Melrose made an ominous warning about how the league would respond: "If this works, enjoy it," he said, "'cause I gotta think they'll have a trick up their sleeve so it'll never happen again."
For starters, Don Cherry has slowly been moving towards retarded for years. He's there now. Reserve the special little bus. And, gee, Gretzky has no respect for the players who do the dirty work in the corners and in front of the net...what a shocker. Yeah, he's got real class. (It also explains why his team is feather pillow soft.)
It also looks like the NHL wasn't happy about things either because they cooked the books to keep Rory out of the All Star game.
Despite all the news coverage—and all the efforts of the Vote-O-Matic—Fitzpatrick's vote totals had fallen off a cliff. After receiving 285,000 votes the two previous weeks, he got just 58,000 in the week ending on Dec. 26 and dropped to third place in the standings. Had the Vote for Rory campaign run out of steam? Or did the NHL brass decide it was time to take matters into their own hands?
I believe the evidence suggests the NHL cooked the books. Since the league counted only ballots that were entirely filled in, there should have been an equal number of votes cast for hockey's two conferences. But for the week after Christmas, players in the Eastern Conference received 6 percent more votes than those in Fitzpatrick's Western Conference. Among defensemen, the results were even more skewed: The guys in the West—Rory among them—got 16 percent fewer votes overall. (These discrepancies were about three times bigger than any that had come before.) As bloggers were quick to point out, the numbers were exactly what you'd expect to see if the league had manually dumped 100,000 Rory votes. Nothing has been proved, but I'm hard-pressed to come up with another reasonable explanation.
And the NHL's word on the matter?
Thanks for the interest...not sure what "totals" you're referring to that don't seem to add up...but we don't release every single vote for every single player, just the top vote-getters. However, rest assured that no voting for Rory was ever compromised.
The NHL has no soul.
I'll tell you what the real travesty is, not that Rory Fitzpatrick might have made the All Star team, but the fact that a piece of shit player (and cheap shot artist to boot) like Jonathan Cheechoo is.
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