Soccer line sport > Blog > Sport > Cult of Hockey: Fringe NHL’er John Scott is an All-Star game captain. Good. – Edmonton Journal

Cult of Hockey: Fringe NHL’er John Scott is an All-Star game captain. Good. – Edmonton Journal

It was inevitable that at some point the NHL’s decision to allow hockey fans to vote for participants in the NHL All-Star game would result in the arrival of an unconventional candidate. That finally happened this year, when enforcer John Scott was voted the captain of the Pacific division for the 2016 All-Star game.

There will be no shortage of columns explaining why this is a terrible thing. Social media exploded when the results were announced on Saturday morning. Many suggested that fans had lost the right to vote for the All-Star game. Loud voices proclaimed the choice a joke and an embarrassment. Some called for Scott to immediately rule himself out of the game.

To my mind, this is actually a good thing, and it certainly increases my level of appreciation for Scott and my personal level of interest in the All-Star game.

It’s true that Scott isn’t an NHL star. He’s a depth player, a 6’8” left wing who has carved out a 285-game career based on his fighting ability and physical play. His career-high for points in a season as a professional is five, set in 2008-09 when he scored four with the AHL’s Houston Aeros and added one with the Minnesota Wild.

But it’s also true that this is a distinction of degree, not of type. The NHL All-Star game has seen plumbers play there before, after they were put there by the league. All 30 teams need a participant, and with 40-odd players going to the event that means a lot of deserving candidates have been left off the roster every year. Thanks to things like expansion, it also means that some rosters sent decidedly undeserving players to the event.

It’s a game which has played around with format over the years, desperately searching for relevancy, and which eventually opted for a draft process at the event after it became abundantly clear that nobody had any emotional investment in Eastern Conference vs. Western Conference or (worse) North America vs. World. Fan voting is part of that search.

It’s a game taken lightly by players, to a point where participation is sometimes seen as more nuisance than honour. The league actually suspended Detroit’s Pavel Datsyuk and Nicklas Lidstrom for a game in 2009 when the two pulled out of the event to nurse injuries which hadn’t cost them any regular season games. Last year, the NHL made a point of reminding general managers about those suspensions, a not so subtle warning which wouldn’t have been made if the league wasn’t worried about the possibility of no-shows.

In the same vein, it’s worth noting that Florida’s Jaromir Jagr was voted in as a captain on the same day as Scott, after publicly asking not to be included in the event:

There’s no integrity to be lost at the All-Star game; it’s treated by virtually all parties with less seriousness than the typical NHL preseason affair. There’s no snub of a deserving candidate here either, because deserving candidates are snubbed all the time in the name of drawing from all 30 NHL teams, and more importantly because at least some of those deserving candidates would rather spend the day on the couch than show up anyway.

The All-Star game is about spectacle. That 2009 game which Datsyuk and Lidstrom missed is most memorable not for the final score or the hardest shot or anything of that type, but rather for Alex Ovechkin putting on a hat with a Canadian flag, some goofy glasses and taking two sticks to score a goal in the shootout competition.

This is not a serious event. I can’t imagine what prompts anyone to take it seriously.

The presence of Scott is fun. I can’t remember the last time I was interested in any All-Star game storyline, but the presence of the 6’8” enforcer with, say, Drew Doughty and Taylor Hall in a three-on-three contest would be fun to see. Can a depth NHL forward playing as best he can keep pace with a bunch of the game’s best skaters going at half-speed? Will Scott inject a hit or two into a game where physical contact is all but non-existent?

The league is constantly searching, and generally failing, to manufacture fun out of the All-Star game. Are fans really to be blamed for injecting some entertaining chaos into the blandest event on the NHL calendar?