Bleu, Blogue, Rouge: All-Star ballot-box stuffing embarrassment to Habs players, organization

But the club has also preserved and promoted its history and legendary players better than any other in hockey, which is why this 100th season has been tastefully special, one more embrace of what has gone before.

So it’s unfortunate now to witness a legion of Canadiens fans who know more about Vista than Vézina stuffing the digital ballot box for January’s Bell Centre All-Star Game. Their goal, through javascript and fingertip, is to ensure that all six Canadiens on the ballot will be named to the Eastern Conference starting lineup.

I’d suggest that the Canadiens organization is more than a little embarrassed by this.

And no matter how the half-dozen Montreal players publicly laud the passion of their fans, they’re surely red-faced, too. Any lustre of being voted to the All-Star Game is flushed with this frantic scheme.

Penguins' Crosby miles behind in fourth place

Forwards Alex Kovalev, Saku Koivu and Alex Tanguay, defencemen Andrei Markov and Mike Komisarek and goalie Carey Price are not merely leading every other player in their Eastern Conference categories. They are ahead by ridiculous margins, their monstrous numbers fuelled by computer-vote programs written to carpet-bomb, around the clock, for all six at once.

Last evening, four days into balloting, Kovalev, Koivu and Tanguay had vote totals nearing 200,000. The next closest forward, Pittsburgh’s Sidney Crosby, was approaching 88,000.

(In the Western Conference, where Detroit fans are similarly if less actively engaged in lobbying for the Red Wings, forwards Henrik Zetterberg, Pavel Datsyuk and Marian Hossa had about 90,000 each. In fourth, Calgary’s Jarome Iginla had roughly 85,000.)

On defence: Markov was at 214,000 and Komisarek at 195,000; Washington’s Mike Green was third at not quite 68,000.

In goal: Price had topped 210,000, leading the Penguins’ Marc-André Fleury by 167,000.

Last season, a richly deserving Markov was elected as a starter with 316,136 votes. At this rate, he’ll eclipse that total well more than a month before the Jan. 2 election close.

Maybe this nonsense is as silly as the All-Star Game itself, a popularity contest and nothing more. It’s a non-contact, strictly-for-laughs exercise designed to please fans, stroke sponsors, attract B-list celebrities and run up football scores to further convince NHL brass that nets should be larger and goalies smaller.

Digital ballot-box stuffing began in 2006-07, the first year of the unlimited online vote, when New Yorker Steve Schmid decided as a gag to lobby for the selection of Vancouver Canucks journeyman blue-liner Rory Fitzpatrick.

A Vancouver programmer’s subsequent “Rory Vote-O-Matic” swamped the league with 285,000 write-in votes in just two weeks.

Fitzpatrick, a 42-game Canadien in 1995-96, ultimately fell short and avoided selection humilation. Now, computer-literate Montreal fans have piled onto this ill-conceived bandwagon.

Canadiens stripped of thousands of votes

Late last week, the NHL said it was studying the legitimacy of this Habs runaway, the rules stating that automated voting activity is prohibited. Saturday into yesterday morning, it stripped thousands of votes from the Canadiens, as many as 20,000 from Kovalev alone if you’re to believe the “real-time” totals.

But then, does it really matter? The All-Star Game long ago took a fork in the road from its original purpose and much of its relevence.

The first official game, at Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens on Oct. 13, 1947, was played between coach Hap Day’s Maple Leafs and Canadiens coach Dick Irvin’s all-stars. One-third of proceeds went to children’s charities designated by the Maple Leafs, two-thirds to the newly created NHL Players Emergency (Benevolent and Disability) Fund.

The Maple Leafs lost 4-3, Canadiens defenceman Ken Reardon earning two assists and even a major penalty for fighting Toronto rearguard Vic Lynn. In an all-star game.

Goaler Bill Durnan, defenceman Butch Bouchard and forward Maurice Richard, with Reardon first-team all-stars in 1946-47, were the other Canadiens on Irvin’s bench.

Fanfare trumpeters heralded the on-ice arrival of each star, which Reardon later recalled as “one of the most moving moments of my career. …

“We were so determined to win that game you could almost hear the fellows grinding their teeth as they walked to the ice,” he said in Andrew Podnieks’s book The NHL All-Star Game: Fifty Years of the Great Tradition. “I never saw a group so fired up in all my hockey career.”

The game, which truly meant something in the late Reardon’s day, has taken many forms through six decades, a contest between teams, conferences, political rivals, even continents.

Where Reardon and Lynn were slugging one another in 1947, the only hits in January’s Bell Centre game will be to the voting website, many fans balloting even while asleep.

Maybe it’s time for the NHL to designate a committee to objectively select the all-star rosters, based purely on performance. Let the fans choose honourary captains and the players they wish to see in the skills competition, which is far more entertaining than the game anyway.

Montreal fans would be better off refreshing their players instead of their browsers. They’d be doing their heroes a bigger favour by flooding the vote for the other guys, to give six Canadiens a few precious days away from the rink in late January.

Canadiens defenceman Andrei Markov seems bound for his second consecutive All-Star Game. Here he scores on Western Conference goalie Chris Osgood in last year's contest in Atlanta.
Dave Sandford, Getty Images