Rory Fitzpatrick is the kind of hard-working journeyman that is becoming harder and harder to find in the National Hockey League today. He doesn’t have the stats of your typical all-star player. In fact, he isn’t on the official all-star ballot at all. Fitzpatrick has exactly one assist this season and only nine goals after a decade in the league. But that didn’t stop Steve Schmid of New York from starting what has now become a national movement: the Vote for Rory campaign.
Not too long ago, the National Hockey League was in the midst of a bitter lockout that posed a considerable threat to the future of the League. The lockout did eventually come to an end, and the sport that gave us the “Miracle on Ice” was brought back to this country. I thought that the NHL had learned its lesson and would treat its fans with the respect one would expect from a league that is a few mistakes away from competing with Major League Soccer for airtime. Unfortunately, the Vote for Rory campaign makes it seem like the fans are once again being left out in the cold.
Schmid, who thought that it would be a good change of pace to see a hard-working, little-known veteran like Fitzpatrick make it to the All-Star game, probably had no idea that what began as a one-man crusade would expand into YouTube, and from there onto the pages of USA Today, Sports Illustrated and the New York Times. The reception by the media and fans alike appeared to be largely positive, and the campaign was portrayed as a grass roots movement to change the league.
With the help of all of the news coverage and a robot known as the Rory-O-Matic (a Firefox add-on that automatically votes for Rory), Fitzpatrick garnered 285,000 votes within the first two weeks before Christmas. However, curiously enough, he received only 58,000 the following week. As Daniel Engber of Slate pointed out, the League counted only ballots that were entirely filled in, so there should have been an equal number of votes cast for hockey’s two conferences.
But during the week after Christmas, players in the Eastern Conference received 6 percent more votes than those in Fitzpatrick’s Western Conference. The ballot results on NHL.com show that there were 50,000 more votes in the Eastern Conference. This should be impossible, as only full ballots (that is, a ballot with equal votes for both East and West) are to be counted. Engber noted that among defensemen, the results were even more skewed: the players in the West—Rory among them—got 16 percent fewer votes overall. Where did the votes go? While nothing has been proven, the numbers were exactly what you’d expect to see if the League had dumped 100,000 Rory votes. Now that she isn’t a member of Congress anymore, perhaps Katherine Harris can find employment in the NHL. I’m sure they wouldn’t make a federal case out of it.
In all seriousness, though, I understand that the use of Rory-O-Matic brings Fitzpatrick’s total vote count into question. Whether or not this completely invalidates Fitzpatrick as a player on the All-Star team, I don’t know. What I do know is that there seems to be an awful lot of support behind this campaign, and that many fans thought this would be good for the sport.
I also know that regardless of where those votes came from, for the League to throw this back in the faces of devoted fans is nothing short of professional suicide. If the league did this to compensate for the illegitimate votes, they could have done it publicly and justified themselves. But to do it quietly, behind the scenes, not only indicates an awareness that such a move would be quite unpopular, but also implies a complete lack of respect for NHL fans. Would the League really go so far as to tamper with the votes in order to keep one player out of the All-Star game?
