The NHL All-Star Game is coming up in a couple days. This year is the first All-Star game since 2004 (2005 was missed due to the lockout, 2006 was skipped due to the Winter Olympics) and many saw it as an opportunity for the league to continue their rebound from the bad feelings caused by the lockout, highlight some of their brightest young stars like Sidney Crosby and Alexander Ovechkin, and reach out to the fans by allowing them to vote for the starting line-up soley via an online system for the first time ever.
To encourage fans to be involved, the NHL allowed fans to vote as many times as they wanted. Unfortunately, one fan decided to take advantage of this rule by starting a write-in “Vote For Rory Fitzpatrick” campaign (Rory is a journeyman defenseman with the Vancouver Canucks who, as of today, has a whopping 1 goal and 2 assists this year.) The campaign caught on with fans and the media across North America and Rory quickly vaulted up to one of the starting positions. Part of the reason for this was some tech-savvy fans who wrote bots that thwarted the NHL's (feeble) security measures and automated the process of voting multiple times for Rory. (An analogy might be that they saw the “take a penny/leave a penny” jar and took all fifty pennies in it to buy a chocolate bar – technically “legal” but definitely not in the spirit of the penny jar.)
But, even with all of the fan support, both human and automated, when the final results were announced, Rory wasn't among the starters named.
There are obviously two sides to this – people like Wayne Gretzky were on record that this campaign made the league look like a joke (even though the All-Star game is often viewed as a joke anyhow by hockey purists) while others thought “Vote For Rory” was a great media hook that would only serve to stir interest in the league.
But now, a report in the online magazines, Slate, uncovers evidence that indicates the NHL may have purposely distorted the online voting so that Rory didn't win a spot in the starting line-up. Reminiscient of the electronic-voting scandal during the 2000 Presidential election, this is a black mark on the NHL if true.
It's been almost two years since a lockout
almost ruined the sport. Now the league has baited, misled, and
rejected its fans. The NHL has hit a new low. It's turned the All-Star
Game—an event that's supposed to be about giving people what they
want—into a repudiation of the game's most loyal supporters.
http://www.slate.com/id/2157741/
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