Zemgus Girgensons Voted to NHL All Star Game

Zemus Girgensons received the most votes in the 2015 NHL All Star fan voting contest. That's right Zemus Girgensons the Latvian native playing in his second year with the Buffalo Sabres is apparently the most popular NHL player this year. Girgensons was the first overall draft pick in 2012 and is currently tied for 161st in league point getters. He has zero NHL playoff experience and has a total of 113 games played in the NHL. Why Girgensons was selected by fans as the most popular player in the NHL this year can only be described as an enigma. An enigma as defined by Dictionary.com is; "a person or thing that is mysterious, puzzling, or difficult to understand." I think that sums up my feeling on this subject exactly. Let us look at the facts. Girgensons is a little known European player playing in Buffalo. The Sabres, at least this year, can be described as a lack lustre basement dwelling team at best. Without the support of southern Ontario residents crossing the border for cheaper tickets I do not think that Buffalo would even be able to support a team. There is a reason O Canada is played at every Sabres game even when both teams are from the United States. To think that there are over a million and a half Buffalo Sabres fans that voted for Girgensons is simply moronic. I think it may be hard to find that many true Sabres fans in total never mind enough to actually go online and vote for someone most people have never even heard of. Take a look at the other five players as voted by fans. All five are from the Chicago Blackhawks. All five are popular well known players with Stanley Cup rings. All five come from a huge and successful hockey market. The fact that Girgenson came in first in fan voting can only be attributed to two scenarios. 

Scenario One

The first scenario  is that every resident in the country of Latvia went online and voted for their most successful NHL hockey player. The population of the entire country is just over 2 million. A recent internet search on Latvia shows that around 70% of the population has access to the internet with 60% of its people using the internet at least once a week. Girgensons received 1, 574, 896 votes in total. Simple mathematics would tell us that there are not enough people using the internet in Latvia to account for such a scenario. Unless voters are allowed to cast votes numerous times this does not seem like a viable solution to the enigma. 

Scenario Two

The second more plausible conclusion I have come to is that society as a whole has decided to make a mockery of the NHL All Star fan voting process. It would appear to me that the only way Zemus Girgensons receives more than 300,000 more votes than the next closest player (Patrick Kane, a current Chicago Blackhawk and a Buffalo native) is that people have clearly played some sort of internet joke. By voting for someone that has no obvious reason to be in an All Star game the hockey watching public has done a great disservice to this great sport. I think this is the last time we will see the general public being used as a determiner for who plays in the NHL All Star game.