John Scott All-Star?
Over the course of his career, John Scott has been called many things. Enforcer. Goon. Journeyman. One thing no one ever expected him to be called was an All-Star, but that’s all about to change, and he’s going to make the most of it.
Scott never asked for the fans to vote him in. In fact, his life would have been a lot easier over the last few months if that campaign had never happened. He’s been pushed and pulled in every direction. Dumped on one AHL team, traded, dumped back to another AHL team, and essentially told to back out, bribed, and bullied by the NHL and his former team, the Arizona Coyotes.
I guess they never learned what the main character traits of an enforcer are. Toughness, determination, grit. The idea that anyone expected him to back down is ludicrous.
Respect the Player, Change the Game
What can they possibly do to him that has not already been done? His wife is nine months pregnant with twins and he’s been dumped in Newfoundland, just about the furthest place they could think to dump him on short notice.
What can they offer him that he can not get for himself? An all expense paid trip to the All-Star Game they were determined not to let him play in? No, thank you.
Of course, Scott does not make Alex Ovechkin or Jonathan Toews salaries. However, he has earned close to five million dollars over the course of his eight-year career. More than many people will likely earn in a lifetime. If he wanted to go and watch the All-Star game, he certainly doesn’t need the NHL to foot the bill.
If anything, their determination to keep him out simply added fuel to his desire to play. It also earned yet another black spot on the NHL’s not so sound judgment of late.
No Crime, Harsh Punishment
Another thing that John Scott has that many NHL players do not is a degree in engineering, because let’s face it, guys like Scott need the backup plan. While he hoped to one day play in the NHL, his destiny would never be anything less than a dream he would have to fight for every single day. Today, he is still fighting to stay, even though his skill was never going to take him to the upper stratosphere like some players in the NHL.
As it turns out, that backup plan hasn’t been necessary as of yet, but it still punctuates a fact that the NHL itself seems to be missing. While John Scott is by all accounts an enforcer, he is anything but stupid.
He knows when he is being manipulated and that trade to Montreal was just one more step in trying to hang Scott out to dry. The league was bound and determined not to have him in the All-Star game, even if they had to bury him in the far reaches of the AHL to keep him from being eligible to play.
They felt it was an embarrassment, but the real embarrassment was that the NHL had created a system that allowed him to get selected in the first place. He wasn’t the first, but he was the most obvious square peg in their perfectly round little world.
He’s not good enough for this league’s reindeer games, but he has been good enough for the last eight years to play in the NHL? A feat that many more talented players have failed to accomplish.
In fact, there are hundreds of players that were drafted over those eight years that flamed out after one season, if they made it to the NHL at all, and most of them probably had top end skill and high expectations. John Scott never had those expectations; He was a role player, and he knew his role. He was satisfied with his place in the league. He never asked for this, and yet he is being punished.
All-Star Farce
The league should have done something about the voting after last season’s debacle, but they chose to simply alter how many players the fans got to select. That did nothing to solve the problem. Instead, it just made the flaws more apparent.
The NHL then proceeded to forget the one thing that nearly every kid hears from a very early age, ‘Two wrongs do not make a right.’ At that point, the league was at a crossroads. Scott had been selected as a captain, and they should have just shrugged their collective shoulders and accepted that they had failed in their effort to ‘purify’ the voting process.
Instead, they went another route. They threw their crayons on the floor and pulled just about every underhanded thing they could think of to undo the mistake.
John Scott All-Star!
Unfortunately, their manipulations were done in the public eye, and no one was missing the fact that they had attempted to make Scott their puppet. Pull the strings and make him bend to their will, no one will notice.
Everyone did.
So today, John Scott took his turn on media day. It was not Patrick Kane, or Pekka Rinne, or even Braden Holtby holding court with the biggest crowd. It was John Scott. And it wasn’t Evgeni Malkin, Steven Stamkos or Jamie Benn selling the most All-Star t-shirts. Again, it was John Scott.
Is this the point when the NHL realizes that the world sees the man behind the curtain? That their bluff has been called?
Certainly, John Scott has not hidden from the storyline as it unfolded, and he could have chosen to fight fire with fire. Instead, he did what he has always done. He’s kept his head down and done his job, no matter where Scott laced up his skates.
He hasn’t been silent about his distaste for how the plot played out, but he has been respectful, and he has made the most out of the opportunity he has been given. John Scott may not have been the guy the league wanted, but he got his votes, and he will participate. Something that never should have come into question in the first place.
John Scott is an All-Star, and it should never have been the league’s job to change that.