All Sport Report

I’ll be the first to admit, I though the notion of voting a write in candidate to the NHL All Star game was a bit silly, but team Rory had their stuff together. Okay, so he’s not going to start in the game, he finished third in the voting for Western Conference defensemen behind Scott Niedermayer and Nicklas Lidstrom, two perennial powerhouses among hockey defensemen. My first inclination was “told you so” in the direction of the Rory Fitzpatrick faithful, until I examined the results of the voting.

Journeyman defenseman Rory Fitzpatrick, the man of a meager one point thus far in the season recieved 550,174 write in votes for the NHL all-star game, making him by far the highest write in vote recipient in the history of write in voting for an NHL All Star spot. In fact Rory received more votes than seven of the players who will start on January 24th.

Sidney Crosby was the top vote getter overall, which comes as no shock, but only four other starters got more votes than Fitzpatrick: Bill Campbell of Buffalo, Joe Thornton of San Jose and Niedermayer and Lidstrom. This means three of the top six vote getters were Western Conference defensemen, I don’t have all of the voting history directly in front of me, but I’d venture to say it would be a safe bet that this has never occured before.

Fitzpatrick got more votes than Eastern Conference captain Bredan Shanahan, he also got more votes than Teemu Selanne and Joe Sakic and he didn’t earn a starting spot, correct me if I’m wrong but something certainly doesn’t seem right here.

I’m not saying that something underhanded definitely happened, but I would like to suggest that Team Rory start getting everything together early next season for their second effort, Let’s get Fitzpatrick one million votes next season, just to make sure there’s nothing rotten in Denmark(or Canada)