Bruins Beat: All Star Shenanigans

To continue this small Bruins blog I'd like to take a moment and discuss some of the recent events that involved the NHL, more specifically the NHL All star game. This year, the NHL allowed fans to vote for one captain from each division and an additional 10 players from each division who would then be broken into small 3 man teams to compete during the weekend. Now as soon as I heard that fans would be allowed to vote for all the players and the captains I knew that something screwy was going to happen because putting the power in the Internets hands is almost never a good idea. To confirm my suspicions, the winner of this years pacific division All Star captaincy ended up being the one and only John Scott of the Arizona Coyotes. Scott is almost exactly the opposite of the type of player that should be allowed to compete during All Star weekend, a 7 foot tall goon who has a total of 11 points and over 500 penalty minutes in his career. Most other players that were voted in have more points in the first half of their season than Scott does in his career and yet Scott overwhelmingly won the captains vote for the Pacific Division due to the fact that he was the oddball and trolls everywhere decided they wanted to ruin what little credibility this event had, if it even had any to begin with. The major problem I have with his selection is that it also deprives the Coyotes of having a real representative at the All Star game, instead being forced to send Scott in place of a more deserving player like Oliver Ekman-Larsson.
The league tried to override this decision which would have been happy with if they didn't try to do so in the most shady and underhanded way. To summarize, the NHL basically orchestrated a trade where the Coyotes sent Scott and another prospect to Montreal in return for a middle of the road defensive prospect. Montreal was then instructed to send Scott down to the AHL in order to make him ineligible for the All Star game. Unfortunately for the league both the media and fans were outraged at how the league handled this situation and in the face of losing many viewers to a boycott the league decided to allow Scott to represent the Pacific Division anyway. I am both happy and sad at the outcome of this, for although I don't believe Scott belongs in the All Star game he definitely does not deserve to be booted out in such a manner. Overall, this whole situation makes me sad as it shows that the fans really don't care about the All Star game at all and would rather ruin the credibility of being selected to the All Star team in order to send a goon to skate around and get embarrassed by real All Stars.