January 19, 2016 edit: Today, the NHL decided to make things right and confirmed that John Scott will be attending the All-Star Game in Nashville and will serve as the captain of the Pacific Division’s All-Stars despite getting traded to Montreal and being assigned to their AHL team in Newfoundland. Good job, NHL. My angry take on the matter from a couple days ago has been neutralized for the most part, but you can still read it below.
The National Hockey League has proven once again how out of touch it is with its fans. Not since the 2012 Lockout, in the months when before I started this blog, and was using my university’s newspaper as the outlet to vent my frustrations about the issues that plague the sport I love have I been so angry with the powers that be. I had mellowed out a bit as a hockey fan since then. Sure, Gary Bettman isn’t a great commissioner, but my focus was turned to the overwhelming incompetence of Roger Goodell at the helm of the NFL. Sure, the hockey owners are a collection of billionaires who made Mr. Potter from It’s A Wonderful Life look like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, but NFL owners were no better, and in fact far worse given how much more profitable their league is and given that NHL player contracts are fully guaranteed, while NHL contracts are not. I had accepted that the NHL would not become bigger than the NBA, but recognized that the NBA was doing a lot of things really well from a business standpoint, and started to root for them to overtake the NFL in popularity. I thought there were things the NHL could do to improve their standing, and borrow from the way the NBA was growing their fanbase, and I thought that was working. All of that may still be true, but this week I cannot help but feel disgusted by the NHL, and feel sorry for John Freaking Scott of all people.
For those who haven’t been paying attention (and I can’t blame you if you haven’t), the NHL this year decided to change the format of the All-Star Game yet again. In the past, they’ve done Eastern Conference vs. Western Conference like the NBA always does, American players vs. Canadian players, North American players vs. European players, and had team captains pick the teams like it’s kickball in middle school gym class, and those are just the formats I can remember off the top of my head. This year, after the success of changing the regular season overtime format from 4 on 4 to 3 on 3, they decided to make the All-Star Game 3 on 3 as well. It is my understanding that there is still an aspect of the captains picking teams system (I’m not entirely sure, and I honestly don’t care enough about an exhibition game that has been seemingly changing on the fly as long as I’ve been following hockey), but the game itself would be injected with the fun skates-on-fire chaos that exists when each team has two fewer players on the ice. Considering all the different ways the NHL has tried to shake up the All-Star Game, and considering that they haven’t even played the All-Star Game half the time this decade because it gets cancelled any time there’s a work stoppage or the Winter Olympics, the NHL All-Star Game shouldn’t be taken too seriously, and should be fun, right?
Enter Jeff Marek of Sportsnet and Greg Wyshynski of Yahoo Sports. They host the popular hockey podcast Marek vs. Wyshynski, which I have pitched to my Boston area friends as Felger and Mazz if Felger and Mazz only talked about hockey and pop culture, and if Mike Felger was Canadian and sounded Canadian. They had the idea on their show of trying to get John Scott of the Arizona Coyotes, a career enforcer in an era when that role is declining faster than seven footers with no shooting range who can’t hit free throws and running backs taken in the top ten of the NFL Draft. According to Scott’s Hockey Reference page, the 32 year old Michigan Tech alumnus has played for six NHL teams, and has amassed a whopping five career goals to go with 542 penalty minutes. Marek and Wyshynski thought it would be amusing to see 6’8″ John Scott in a 3 on 3 situation, skating against the likes of Patrick Kane or Alex Ovechkin, in a situation that his coach would never trust him in a real game.
Marek vs. Wyshynski planted the seed of John Scott’s All-Star candidacy, but it was Reddit that took the idea and ran with it, because that’s how the Internet works in 2015-16. Scott ran away with the All-Star vote, and in doing so, generated more interest for the NHL All-Star Game than I can ever remember. One would think that the NHL would be excited about the publicity, that even if the buzz around the All-Star Game was Internet trolling (albeit in maybe the mildest form of trolling I’ve ever seen), at least it was generating buzz.
We live in a world where people feel like they need to be outraged about something at all times. That’s why Donald Trump is leading in the polls, that’s why air in a football in a blowout of an AFC Championship Game was treated like something that should actually be of concern, and that’s why members of the hockey media who for years thought of the All-Star Game as nothing more than a pointless exhibition are now upset over the sanctity of their precious tradition being tarnished by a goon like John Scott being voted in. Measures have been taken to take the All-Star rosters out of the hands of the fans, to prevent a national tragedy like this from happening again, but the way John Scott has been treated has been far worse.
Before I go any further, I should say that I am no fan of John Scott the player. In 2013, I wrote a post on this very blog saying that Scott gives hockey a bad name. I think the only reason he’s in the NHL is because he can fight. I am one of those people who believes that fighting still has a place in the game, but that fighting for the sake of fighting is a thing of the past. The best era of Bruins hockey in my lifetime could be called The Shawn Thornton Era. Shawn Thornton signed with the B’s after winning the Stanley Cup with Anaheim in 2007, and was a fixture of the team and the community until 2014. During that span, the Bruins became relevant again, made the playoffs every year, won the Stanley Cup, came within 17 seconds of Game 7 in another Stanley Cup Final, and won their first President’s Trophy in over 20 years. Thornton was the team’s enforcer, but was more than a fighter. He could actually play hockey, and while he was never any kind of offensive juggernaut, he did score ten goals in the 2010-11 season. That is my idea of what an NHL enforcer should be, and John Scott does not fit that mold. That being said, John Scott the person seems like a pretty funny guy (one time, he scored a goal and then had a t-shirt made depicting himself scoring a goal), and a family man. He seemed to be playing along with the joke quite nicely, and was excited to be a part of the All-Star festivities in Nashville with his wife (who is expecting another child) and children. One of the great things about the constant sports coverage we get thanks to the Internet is that we get to see the person behind the name, behind the actions on the ice that we may not like. It’s good to remember that the guy who is a punchline in hockey forums and on sports talk radio is actually a person, too. It’s all in good fun, or at least that’s what most people working outside the NHL offices who pay attention to this trivial story seemed to think.
According to Bob McKenzie, the NHL and the Arizona Coyotes asked Scott to bow out of the All-Star Game, and he refused. In response to that, the NHL did their best to make John Scott go away. This week, the Coyotes send Scott down to the minors, which is not unusual for a guy like Scott, who has been straddling the line between the NHL and AHL his entire career, and yesterday the Coyotes traded him to Montreal, where the Canadiens promptly assigned him to their AHL affiliate in St. John’s, effectively ending his eligibility for the All-Star Game unless the Habs decide to call him up to their NHL roster.
The weirdest thing about the way the John Scott situation was handled by the league is the way they passive-aggressively gave it the “nothing to see here” routine that made it a much bigger deal than conducting business as usual. Sending him to the AHL is one thing, but Arizona trading him to Montreal is another. I found out about Scott getting traded because I got a news alert from the Yahoo Sports app on my phone while I was at work. Because I’m too lazy to adjust the settings, I usually only get alerts that pertain to the Bruins (and the other Boston teams), unless it’s a really big deal. For instance, last week, I did not get an alert about the Ryan Johansen/Seth Jones trade between Columbus and Nashville even though two good young players taken with high picks in recent years moved in the deal. I had to find out about that one on Reddit, but “All-Star Captain John Scott has been traded to Montreal” was something my phone needed me to know right away.
If Scott got to play in the All-Star Game, it would be something to tune into. He wouldn’t be the first enforcer named to the All-Star Game. When Mike Milbury was coach of the Bruins, he selected Chris “Knuckles” Nilan to the All-Star team, and people were mad about it then, but at the end of the day, who really cares? The fact the Gary Bettman or whoever is pulling the strings with the Scott fiasco is going this far to discredit the fan vote seems to forget that the fans who vote for John Scott are the same people who are what make the NHL a viable business. If the league wants to grow, expanding the game to non-traditional hockey markets is certainly important, but so is embracing the weirdness of the fans you already have. John Scott’s All-Star candidacy should be celebrated for what it is: lots of people online trying to tweak with the fabric of an ultimately meaningless exhibition of a game that kids play on frozen ponds, but somehow the economy supports a system in which adults can get paid to play. It’s all supposed to be fun, and that should be obvious. Then again, this is the same league that has cancelled all or part of three different seasons because the billionaires are afraid of making too many players into millionaires at the expense of the fans, at the expense of the customers. Great, now I’m mad about the lockout again. Thanks, Bettman!
Dave's Words 
