John Scott is a very good hockey player, among the general population. Among the pro players in the NHL, he’s nothing special. Scott went to college at the Michigan Technical Institute and played four years of NCAA hockey while studying Mechanical Engineering. If you think about what you do on a regular week, that fact alone is remarkable. Being committed enough to both your hockey career and getting a degree, and being determined enough to do them both, seems insane to me. Scott plays an aggressive, enforcer style of power forward, and had an unremarkable junior and college career. In four years at Michigan Tech he racked up 19 points and 347 penalty minutes.
After graduating, Scott joined the Houston Aeros, the farm team for the NHL’s Minnesota Wild, as a free agent. He played 2 whole seasons with them, splitting a third season between the AHL and the NHL, before making the Wild’s roster in 2009. Since then, he’s bounced around, and narrowly missed getting his name on the Stanley Cup with the Chicago Blackhawks. At the start of this year the journeyman forward joined the Arizona Coyotes, and played just around a dozen games throughout the first half of the season. Throughout his entire career he has scored 5 goals.
The controversy surrounding John has to do with the NHL’s All-Star Game Balloting. This year, the fans got to vote online for the captains of the four teams, one per division, with the rest of the players selected by the league. The vote allowed fans to vote for whoever they wanted, regardless of their qualifications for being an All-Star. This format is similar to one that the NBA employs for their All-Star game. Fans got to vote up to ten times a day, and of course when the internet gets involved, nothing is going to go wrong. Some enterprising fan thought that voting Scott the captain of his divisional team would be a funny joke, since his style of play does not really match the All-Star style.
When asked about the campaign for his captaincy early on he was not overly enthused, but as his bid became a reality he got more and more excited about it. The winning team on All-Star weekend splits a million dollar prize, which would be a big deal for Scott. His family also began to get excited. Scott and his wife have two kids and a set of twins on the way, and the bonuses and prize money could really help them out. Then something really strange happened, when the internet’s heart grew three sizes. People started to find out that Scott is just a hard-working good guy, and the campaign turned from an internet joke to a feel good story.
The NHL feels very strongly about its All-Star weekend. For them, it’s nothing to joke about at all. For everyone else it’s a slight distraction from the regular season, and a weekend for most of our favourite players to rest. The NHL doesn’t really like it when anyone questions the sanctity of the All-Star weekend, so they were not overly impressed when the campaign for John Scott started picking up steam. They stopped promoting the fan vote to try to quell the tide. When the announcement came in early January that Scott would be captaining the Pacific Division’s team there was a collective cheer from fans involved. The NHL had other plans though.
Shortly after being named captain Scott was asked by both the NHL and his own team’s organization to step down. The Coyotes wanted to showcase one of their other players, a rising star like Max Domi or their captain Shane Doan. Scott declined, having finally warmed to the idea of a trip to Nashville to play with the sport’s best. The NHL had other plans, though. On the afternoon of Friday January 15th, the universal time for bad news, the league threw a temper tantrum. A trade was orchestrated between Scott’s Coyotes and the Montreal Canadiens which sent Scott to play for Montreal’s farm team in St. John’s. This trade officially disqualified him from playing in the All-Star game. It also uprooted Scott and his family and virtually ended any future that Scott would’ve had playing in the top league. It looked like Scott was going to pay the price for being made captain.
There was sizable backlash when this announcement was made, as fans knew that Scott’s dilemma was a direct result of the voting campaign. Scott himself seemed disappointed by the move, but seemed ready to accept what had happened. He had a few options though. The monetary nature of the bonuses and prize opportunities that had been presented to him and then taken away meant that he could sue the league through the NHL’s Player’s Association. While the league could definitely take the hit from this, the bad press that it would’ve generated and the stigma towards the All-Star game would have had a strong negative impact. The league is already criticized for its outdated player conduct review policies. On January 19th the NHL gave in to popular demand and made John Scott an All-Star once more. I look forward to watching Scott play in what will probably be his last, and most memorable, NHL game.
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