2009 NHL all-star game

there was something special about the 2009 all-star game from the beggening. Montreal asked to host the yearly event in 2009 as a part of the teams 100th anniversaries celebrations.

Like for the past couple years, the nhl allowed the public to vote for the starting lineup of both the eastern and western team. the same stupid system used to elect Rick Astley - never gonna give you up as the best act ever and by that i mean the ability to vote over and over and over as much as you wish. Even if Rory Flitzpatrick was elected on the starting lineup last year (he refused the invitation), its like the nhl didnt learn from its mistake and kept the same system.

Now if we exclude people using programs to vote and over and over. the best way to elect someone is to actually have more fans voting and im certain the Montreal Canadiens have the most fans out of any NHL team. not only do they have more fans, they also have very devoted fans that love their home team. So when the vote started, it was normal that the montreal players would get a lot of votes. i was not surprised when i heard that the starting lineup was gonna be 6 montreal canadiens players 1 week after the voting started. But i still had a problem with that, while i and the other fans like montreal players, this is the all-star games, where the best players in the league meet to play a game, not this is where your favorite players play togheter game. unfortunately you cannot control the mass of voters, a mass constituted mainly of canadiens fans. the nhl then saw this ridiculous starting lineup and decided to check and see if there was cheating in the vote, if people used a program or script to vote and over. then they removed several thousand votes for habs players. but the canadiens players still had a big lead so i guess there really was alot of fans voting.

Next week pittsburgh fans woke up i dunno what woke them up (last years, the san jose sharks had voting booths in front of the arena for people to vote for sharks players) and suddenly 6 pittsburgh players were either in the lead for votes or were really close. Sergei Gonchar (injured since the beggening of the season, Ryan Whitney (missed the start of the season cause of an injury) Crosby, Malkin 2 really good players that should be on the all-star team and lastly their goalie whos not having a really great season Marc-Andre Fleury. I dont know how those players got so many votes but visibly the penguins fans are not smarter than montreal fans. so the battle raged between the 2 teams in the voting. in the end. the 11 players involved had significantly more votes than any other players in the eastern conference (kovalev had 1,2 million and was the 3rd forward) Ovechkin was 5th behind with around 400k votes.

As a result the starting lineup was made of montreal and pittsburgh players for the eastern conference. and while the western team voting wasnt as crazy, the blackhawks and the ducks pretty much won the voting. Basically only teams with a lot of fans were elected instead of actual star players.

but enough talk about the voting. some players decided to not attend like nicklas lidstrom and pavel datsyuk and the nhl suspended them. i guess thats a good thing because 2 really good players were missing during the all-star weekend and if the players dont participate theres no point in having a contest with the best players in the league. speaking of no point, Stephane Robidas, the Dallas Stars defensemen was invited to replace Lidstrom with his whopping 17 points and his nose that was broken 4 times in the past. That is retarded, not only does he not hav many points, hes not the greatest defensemen and theres a ton of better defensemen out there that couldve gotten invited like Dion Phaneuf. at first i thought, well maybe its because the nhl wanted to have a representent for every team, but then i saw that Mike Modano got invited too so the only explanation i could find is that Robidas played for the canadiens before and the nhl thought the fans would like to see him again. Well i'm a fan and i wouldve much prefered to see Dion Phaneuf, Ed Jovanovski, Brian Rafalski, Chris Pronger, Rob Blake or Lubomir Vishnovsky instead to only name a few.

But yea, thats stuff thats out of our control and the whole weekend was still really nice. the skilsl competition was gonna be really boring until ovechkin and malkin pulled their play and ovechkin went on a breakaway with 2 sticks funny glasses and hat and fired from his wrong side. he really saved that event and things got more fun. As far as the game goes, i didnt watch it entirely but im happy for kovalev who said he was gonna be the MVP and he got it with 2 goals and 1 goal in shootout. I also liked the show tim thomas put on everytime he made a save. hes part of the success of this type of event and i hope other players take example and start doing more spectacular moves for the future all-star games.