“Vote for Rory” was more fun than endless texting and voting robots.  :(

Posted by Baroque from Michigan on 01/03/09 at 06:52 PM ET

Boudreau’s talking about LIdstrom, right?

Posted by shep on 01/03/09 at 06:57 PM ET

One vote per email and IP address per day would be a good start.

Posted by George James Malik from South Lyon, MI on 01/03/09 at 07:37 PM ET

Or perhaps all those caps fans that there supposedly are these days could have just voted....
I mean, Pens fans got upset that the extremely undeserving Habs had taken over the votes. So instead of waiting till the voting was over and complaining about it they voted to get the two leading scorers in the NHL where they belong, the top 2 starting spots.  Ovechkin definitely should have made it to the other starting spot, but who’s fault is that? The caps fans(or lack there of).

Posted by Kevin from Pittsburgh on 01/03/09 at 09:27 PM ET

Meh.

I’m a passionate, lifelong caps fan who voted for ovechkin, crosby and malkin for forwards once. It’s just that don’t care about the asg. Everyone knows they are the three best forwards in the game. The fact that someone somewhere had the time to vote otherwise doesn’t really bother me, even if I do think it’s stupid.

Posted by false_cause on 01/03/09 at 10:41 PM ET

Yeah, Pittsburgh fans turned it on but what they did was even more brutal.  Up untillast week the starting line-up had Gonchar, Whitney and Fleury starting.  They barely played at all this season.  That would have been even more embarrassing for the league.

Price and Markov would have been named to the team regardless but Kovalev and Komisarek would not have....just like all 3 of the Pens I mentioned above.

Posted by Mr. Nasty on 01/04/09 at 08:20 AM ET

I also can’t believe Ovechkin is complaining...it is only the starting line-up for the first shift of the game.  lol...it is not like Ovechkin won’t be named to the team.

Posted by Mr. Nasty on 01/04/09 at 08:22 AM ET

Mr. Nasty, Whitney and Gonchar wouldn’t have been allowed to play and Pens fans new that, but some of them were still voting for them just to kinda slap Montreal in the face, but also because when you vote “Pens” through text voting it votes for all 5 of the pens on the ballot.
But as for Fleury goes, I don’t think he deserved to start, or even make the team this season, because he was hurt while the pens were doing decent, and now that he’s back the team is doing so awful that we could have brodeur or a 2 year old, and they would still lose. But he will probably still make the team just because he recieved so many votes.

Posted by Kevin from Pittsburgh on 01/04/09 at 11:21 AM ET

Paul- The process isn’t just questionable, it’s horribly, horribly broken.

I’ve seen the argument presented now in a few places that any blame for the outcome lies at the feet of fans who didn’t vote, apparently on the assumption that there was a lack of interaction from fans of the other 26 teams in the league.  This is even being propagated to some degree by the NHL, who, in describing the East’s third starting forward Alexei Kovalev, state that “1.3 million fans voted” for him.  Hogwash- he got that many votes, sure, I can accept that, but not from anywhere near that many fans.

The “you can’t complain because you should have voted more” argument begs the question- it assumes player selection through ballot box stuffing is acceptable.  It is not.  Ballot box stuffing is no way to determine anything, no matter how trivial.  It makes a mockery out of the voting process while disenfranchising and alienating those who refuse to take part in such a corrupt system.

We’re lucky- we’re having this discussion about an exhibition sporting event, simple entertainment.  But if the NHL wants the fans of the game to look on the All-Star Game as something other than a joke it needs to come up with a better way of selecting the starting lineups.

Posted by monkey from Waiting for the lambs to stop screaming on 01/04/09 at 01:21 PM ET