Internet's power over all-star fan votes mocking pro leagues

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Hockey is yet again on the cutting edge of modern Internet thought, and rather than bathe in the alleged embarrassment of the John Scott matter, it should be celebrating its role in the Zaza Pachulia scandal-ette.

In other words, the all-star fan vote scam has been reduced ... well, perfected, to the prank call it should be, and it all begins with the NHL.

Go back, dear friends, to 2007, when a hardy band of voters assembled a grass-roots campaign (that included cheesy YouTube ads) to put little-used Vancouver Canucks defenseman Rory Fitzpatrick on the Western Conference All-Star team, and it was on the verge of working when the NHL stepped in and (not proven but almost certainly true) fudged the final numbers to get Nicklas Lidstrom and Scott Niedermayer on the team instead.

This hamhanded flouting of the democratic process worked the way it should. The league was mocked for its humorless approach to life, and a movement was born that came to full flower this winter with the Scott (seized from chat boards complaining about the 2014 Zemgus Girgensons vote-a-thon by Yahoo’s Greg Wyshynski) and Pachulia (his home nation of Georgia and Internet tweener darling Hayes Grier) campaigns.

And here’s what comes next: Baseball will be next, because its all-star selection process is the most convoluted, and next to the Pro Bowl the least sensical. It relies heavily on individual get-out-the-vote campaigns as well, so one can assume that someone will try to get up a campaign for a Chris Owings or Alcides Escobar or Erik Kratz or Henry Urrutia or some other sub-anonymous player. And then the Pro Bowl will be flooded with long snappers and backup tight ends

The war between Prank Nation and Marketing Nation, in other words, is on, and the ground is Internet all-star ballots. In other words, do your worst, kids. Your fight is noble, and it must be supported.

The problem, of course, is that all-star games have been reduced in impact by the ability to see every player any time you want, combined with the distance between actual game intensity and these glorified morning skates/pickup games/two-hand touch exhibitions. The biggest drama, frankly, comes with who makes the teams, and even that moderate joy has been stripped away by the leagues’ attempts to monetize the process by giving it to the fans, who know a phony honorific when they see one.

So you get Scott, and you get Pachulia. In fairness, Pachulia is only the fifth NBA player ever from Georgia, has played more games than the other four combined (Tornike Shengelia, Vladimir Stepania, Jake Tsakalidis and Nikoloz Tskitishvili, since you know you were going to ask), and is not a bad player at all. He isn’t Draymond Green, Blake Griffin, Tim Duncan, Anthony Davis, LaMarcus Aldridge or Dwight Howard, just to list some of the players he outpolled, but he outpolled them.

And by fairness, that in the fan-vote world must be held to be binding.

But Pachulia didn’t get enough votes to actually make the starting lineup, and Scott was traded (quite possibly at the league’s behest) and then demoted, though he is being allowed to play in the game after public pressure caused the league to cave.

But the bigger picture remains this: The Internet has spoken on fan voting, gotten the vote out, and the leagues are sudden realizing what they have loosed upon themselves. Thus, they either have to get heavily involved in gaming the system and even the actual voting (“Your Vote Counts Unless We Don’t Like It”), let the fans have their way (“Vote For Your Mom, What Do We Care?”), or simply accept that the All-Star Game has literally nothing to do with merit and should be completely ignored when determining a player’s qualifications.

Which would make it kind of a crap TV event, like so many others.

Frankly, B is the best, most reasonable and publicly acceptable option, at least until the fan/pranksters rise up and seize control of the entire rosters, filling the All-Star teams with Scotts and Pachulias and Urrutias until the entire system collapses under the weight of a nation’s well-aimed scorn.

And frankly, what could be so bad about that?

 

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