John Scott will captain the Pacific Division for NHL All-Star Weekend in Nashville despite a recent trade out of the division and subsequent demotion out of the league.
Advertisement
When you open the voting up to fans to elect captains, you have to be prepared from anything. The trade not only meant he’d be in another division (Montreal is in the Atlantic), but Scott was also sent to the Canadiens’ minor-league affiliate after the trade. “John is a personality that can have fun with the All-Star Game”. At this point it appears the AHL is where it’s at for Scott as far as the Canadiens’ plans, and he accepts that.
But, after all the uproar, the league announced on Tuesday that Scott will in fact still hold on to his roster spot in the ASG.
That will not be the case after the National Hockey League reviewed all of the circumstances.
If you’re going to allow fans to vote for who plays in the game, you have to be willing to live with the results. The NHL may not have orchestrated the Scott trade to Montreal and they may not have seen this coming, but they’re going to be laughing all the way to the attention bank, which is good for the league in a sad way. And in in the past, when players like Zemgus Girgensons and Mike Komisarek were voted into the game as part of fan ballot-box stuffing, they did.
The Arizona Coyotes now have no actual representative in the All-Star game.
Advertisement
The NHL found itself in a pickle again last year when the population of Latvia rallied behind their fellow countryman Zemgus Girgensons, a rather unremarkable second-year player on the Buffalo Sabres at the time. In 1999, a hacker attempted to add more than 25,000 votes to the tallies of Red Sox shortstop Nomar Garciaparra, catcher Scott Hatteberg, second baseman Jose Offerman and third baseman John Valentin. Social media got John Scott elected, and social media got John Scott re-elected.
