A ‘NO’ vote for fans deciding All-Stars

By Angelo Stambene

I have a confession to make. I yell at refs, taunt players, and if you’re a goalie, I’m one of the last people you want behind you in the stands. I believe in the fan experience, which makes these next words so hard to type. Fan voting for All-Star Games has got to go.

The NHL All-Star Game was the last straw for me. Basically, it was the entire Blackhawks roster versus one guy from the Sabres, Zemgus Girgensons, whom the entire nation of Latvia voted for a trillion times.

Now, Latvians were within the rules voting for Girgensons as often as they did, as was Blackhawk nation. But tampering with ballot boxes is so 1920s, and better left for Al Capone.

I understand that professional leagues are trying to make fans feel more involved in the game, but there are some fans who are only a fan of a team or two. Without being aware of the multiple rosters, and not just the ones from their favorite team(s), the All-Star Game becomes diluted.

This dilution is exactly what allows players like P.K. Subban, Pavel Datsyuk, Nicklas Backstrom, Pekka Rinne and Kris Letang to be omitted from the NHL All-Star Game.

That’s not to say that eliminating the fan vote will fix the problems with All-Star Games — but that is a topic for another day. After this year’s NHL All-Star Game debacle, the league could attempt to be ahead of the curve in figuring out how to produce a better product.

After all, the whole point of an All-Star Game is to showcase the talent of the entire league. That the Blackhawks had five players on the team, or that Latvia put a player in the game who’s not even the best player on his own NHL team, makes a mockery of a game that already receives too much hate.

NFL draft hype is nonstop nonsense

By Brent Briggeman

I beg of you, let’s kick this absurd obsession with talking about the NFL draft.

Do we really need months of Mel Kiper Jr. breaking down every facet of a 21-year-old kids’ makeup and ability?

Do we need to watch talking heads stack up players at every position, knowing all the while that at most three or four of the drafted players will likely stick with each team and that the Super Bowl was just decided on a play made by an undrafted rookie?

But this will continue to bombard us through late April. If you watch sports programing, you can’t escape months of talk about the draft.

Begging ESPN to stop this would be futile. It is a media company driven by ratings, so its programming will always reflect what viewers want because to do otherwise would be to invite the audience to look elsewhere. My frustration instead lies with my fellow fans who crave this information to feed an apparently insatiable appetite, because the result is roughly six months of the sports world’s version of really, really bad reality TV that is missing only roses being handed to select players at the combine.

I have no problem with the draft itself being seen in more households than anything this side of the final episodes of “M*A*S*H” and “Cheers.”

The actual draft is interesting.

It impacts teams.

Something happens.

The months and months of talk leading up to the draft is about as meaningful as the Kardashians discussing dinner plans.

I’ll continue to watch football.

I’ll continue to be fan.

But I want sports to serve as an escape, not be something from which I feel there is no escape.

The ballot-box stuffing that put Buffalo Sabres’ Zemgus Girgensons of Latvia in the NHL All-Star game is evidence that fan voting for all-star games needs to stop, says The Gazette’s Angelo Stambene. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)

Gene J. Puskar