An important, must-read article has been brought to my attention. Slate has taken the words out of my mouth and put them into code, for all to read.

Click here for the article.

As a member of the online hockey community, I found out about the “Vote for Rory” campaign just as it was starting up. I recall the confusion that followed the announcement of the first week’s vote tally; the conspiracy theories were already well underway. I remember the fervency with which people would devote hours of their time every day to Rory’s recognition. The elation of supporters upon Rory’s rise to prominence in national media outlets is still fresh in my mind. Now that it’s all over, though, I am going to attempt to be as objective as I can in this retrospective analysis of the phenomenon.

Initially, I thought that the campaign had something to do with the general displeasure of Canucks fans with his play in early November. He was the scapegoat for several consecutive losses, and many were saying that he should not be anywhere near the NHL again. It was shortly thereafter that I stumbled upon the campaign; at the time I thought that it was started by these same Canucks fans, who had chosen Rory as the subject because of his terrible recent play. Later I would find out that it was started elsewhere, by a man from New York. What I do not know is whether it was meant to point out the flaw of the NHL’s system of allowing the fans to vote an indefinite number of times for the game’s starters, or whether the founder just wanted to create a movement to see if the fans could actually do something so outrageous on a whim.

In either case, it’s no secret in the online hockey world that many are none-too-fond of the NHL All-Star Game. They often say that it’s a joke. They say that a contact sport should not have an all-star game. They say that it’s boring because nobody tries to play defense. I, on the other hand, have always looked forward to the all-star games; they offer an opportunity to watch extraordinarily skilled players who wouldn’t otherwise ever get the chance, to play alongside other superstars from around the league. For example, Sidney Crosby will be starting on a line with Alexander Ovechkin on Wednesday evening. This will never happen outside of an all-star game.

I will never forget the 1997 All-Star Game in San Jose. It was easily one of the most entertaining sporting events I have ever viewed; not only were there outstanding goals (a lot of them), but there was brilliant goaltending—perhaps some of the best I’ve ever seen. Never to be forgotten was Owen Nolan’s performance in front of his home crowd. First, he broke the ASG record for fastest consecutive goals (8 seconds). Then, in the third period, when Dominik Hasek was playing perhaps the period of his career (a career that includes two MVP seasons and six Vezina Trophies as the NHL’s top goaltender), Nolan came in alone one last time in the dying minutes of the game after picking up a loose puck. As he skated in on “the Dominator,” he pointed at the top corner and, surely, said, “This time you’re mine.” He then absolutely roofed the puck, off the crossbar and in, over the left shoulder of Hasek. Nolan had scored a hat trick in front of his home crowd and the fans were simply delighted that someone had finally scored after such an outstanding performance of goalkeeping. While my fondest all-star game memories are of this game, the biggest ASG joke in memory, for me, is that neither Domink Hasek nor Owen Nolan was selected as the MVP of that game. But it was still great. [Video of the Third Goal]

As much as I love the annual celebration of the league’s best, though, it is far from sacred in my mind. Plenty of average players have gone before, and will go in the future. Journeyman defenseman Brad Marsh went in 1993, having scored six goals in his past five NHL seasons, including a grand total of zero for the entire 1992-93 season (he actually scored in the all-star game). To say that the integrity of the league is compromised because the fans vote in a hard-working #6 guy is a absurd, in my opinion. And you thought this post would be an objective analysis… I enjoy the all-star game as much as or more than anybody, but it’s all just for fun. If the tenth-highest scorer from a given conference isn’t there, not many people are going to get in a snit over it.

Anyway, because of the aversion towards the game and the NHL’s voting process (San Jose’s players seem to annually get voted in, regardless of the quality of season they are having, so other fans are bitter), many people jumped on the bandwagon right away. Like I said, I knew about the campaign from the get-go, but I thought it was just a joke (it was, but I mean that I didn’t think it would become as serious as it did). It wasn’t until about two weeks later that I found out how much momentum it had gained. People were actually expecting to get this guy to Dallas for the all-star game. Within weeks, the fruits of “Vote for Rory” became evident. His vote totals rose among Western Conference defensemen, and the phenomenon was recognized by such media outlets as TSN, Sportsnet, CBC, Sports Illustrated, ESPN, USAToday, Los Angeles Times, and MSNBC.com.

I wanted in on this phenomenon, having been left behind on so many others. Also, I thought it was a cool idea, for an everyday guy to go to the all-star game. I wanted to feel like I helped do something unthinkable, so I wanted to vote thousands of times, if I could do it without spending too much of my precious time at it. I soon found that voting was about as tedious as playing an NES RPG without a fast-forward function. It would be simple enough to at least create a program that could fill in all the fields for me, so that all I had to do was enter the verification word and click “Submit.” But that wasn’t good enough, either. Within a matter of hours, due to the NHL.com All-Star Ballot’s extremely weak CAPTCHA security system, I found a way to bypass this as well, using only key press sends and application-focus switching. I believe that about 2000 of Rory’s votes came from my computer in a span of less than two days. Later, I discovered that an actual programmer had written a plugin for Firefox in JavaScript to automatically vote for Rory. Regardless, the Rory fan-base was not the only one using automated scripts. During one week, votes for all San Jose players (including write-in votes) skyrocketed without warning. The NHL.com people caught on, and changed some things; they continued to change the system in the following weeks by adding a necessary time-delay (you could now only vote ever 12 seconds or so), and then thousands more CAPTCHA word verification images. This slowed things a bit. (It should also be mentioned that the official Vote for Rory movement did not condone the usage of any automated voting methods. Scripts and bots were also used against Fitzpatrick, to aid Nicklas Lidstrom and Scott Niedermayer to beat him out in the voting.)

Of course, there was an anti-Rory movement as well, headed by none as prominent as Don Cherry and Wayne Gretzky. Don Cherry, in particular, showed a not-surprising lack of class on his weekly show “Coach’s Corner,” seemed to attack him personally. It is fair that Cherry said that Fitzpatrick should decline to go if voted in, but it was not fair to be so aggressive about it when Rory had already said that he had other plans for January 24^th, and many supporters didn’t really expect him to go anyway. Apparently unbeknown to Cherry, Rory was class and humility all the way along. For the record, “Coach’s Corner” co-host Ron MacLean “loved” the campaign.

Meanwhile, once the NHL had cracked down on such nerdish automated voting ways, the campaign continued in earnest. Hardcore voters could still put in about a thousand votes in four hours, and there were passionate people out there who would do such things. Supporters from online hockey forum HFBoards.com alone, for example, claimed to have voted a combined 30,000 times on just the final day of the campaign, yet Rory collected just over 60,000 that week. When it was announced that Fitzpatrick ended up in third, thereby failing to be a lock for the game, the conspiracy theories came up again. I had a feeling they were well-grounded, too. I noticed that there seemed to be a lot fewer votes for Western Conference defensemen than for other positions (when one voted, one had to vote for every position or else the vote was not accepted). Of course, it was impossible to know for sure without the complete voting results, including all write-in votes, which were finally released this past week. I planned to write my “conspiracy post” anyway, but it looks like Slate saved me some detective and Excel work.

This past week, Scott Niedermayer, one of the two Western Conference defenseman with more votes than Rory, pulled out of the game because of an injury problem. Did the NHL let the next-highest vote-getter into the starting lineup instead? Of course not. Randy Carlyle selected Ed Jovanovski from the Phoenix Coyotes to go in his place. Don’t even get me started on the fact that the Coyotes will be sending two players to the game.

Important as anything, Rory himself has proven to be extremely humble about the whole situation. A lot of the players had fun with it, the NHL itself did not publicly condemn it, and the fans got caught up in a debate in which everyone seems to have a strong opinion. As Steve Schmid, founder of “Vote for Rory,” said after it was all over, he could not have picked a better guy as the subject of his campaign than Rory Fitzpatrick.

In the end, it was a shame. The idea behind the all-star vote was that the fans could see whomever they wanted to see at the all-star game. That Fitzpatrick is a #6 defenseman who, before the final vote was tallied, had no points on the year (he now has a game-winning goal and two assists) doesn’t permit Wayne Gretzky to make remarks claiming that the NHL should step in and stop the thing. That’s just not how things are done anymore. This is a democracy. The fans wanted Rory, and the NHL erred in not giving him to them. The biggest shame of all is that, if the vote truly was rigged (and I don’t see how you can say that it wasn’t), the NHL milked the campaign for all it was worth (benefitting from much extra, sorely-needed publicity) without giving the fans what they wanted, just to save face. Perhaps it would have been a silly joke if Rory Fitzpatrick was in the starting lineup for the NHL all-star game; but ultimately it is a disgrace that he will not be.

Labels: Hockey

Posted by Farewell, Free Will on Monday, January 22, 2007 at 7:45 p.m. | Permalink