Sens at Land’s End

Gary Bettman does stupid things pretty much every day, so I think hockey fans are used to it. But forcing injured players to attend the All-Star Game kinda takes the cake.

As we all know, hockey players have a different standard of what “injured” means depending on the importance of a game. You would think that after years of working with these guys, Bettman might understand that by now … if you weren’t familiar with Bettman. It makes perfect sense that Steve Mason or Henrik Zetterberg can play in a game that has actual meaning for his team and still be too hurt to go to a totally meaningless exhibition game. As a fan, I would be pretty pissed off if Dany Heatley went to the ASG and aggravated an injury. It’s not there isn’t a very recent example of a player getting hurt during this type of event.

The NHL has already ensured that the All-Star Game is a huge joke by allowing fans of certain teams to use automated voting scripts to ensure that their players made the starting lineups. I would bet money that they failed to crack down on this solely so they could point out that certain players got “record numbers” of votes this year. Is it any wonder some guys don’t want to go? The whole thing is a complete farce.

Personally, I have enjoyed the All-Star Game in the past, but I don’t know if I can watch this year. My reasons are mainly related to my hatred of Montreal fans — if I do watch I’ll likely have to mute the TV to avoid the “Ole” chant; the ludicrous fan voting has only added to my hatred of them — but this year the NHL is really pissing me off. I wish none of my favourite players were going to be there so I wouldn’t feel any obligation to watch at all, but I’ll be annoyed with myself if Heater or Rick Nash does something awesome and I don’t see it.

I guess I will probably still watch, and I’ll just hope the following things happen:

• Carey Price allows 8-10 goals.
• No one from the Canadiens gets a point.

I am unclear on whether Crosby is being forced to play, or merely to attend — presumably so we aren’t all deprived of his glowing personality and fascinating commentary from the sidelines (”Oh, Ovechkin is a great player, no doubt. Kovalev is fantastic, too, for sure. Heatley is definitely a skilled player. He can hurt you if you give him the chance!”) — but if he does play, wouldn’t it be ironic if he hurt himself enough that he misses the rest of the season? Then how would Bettman feel? The precious! The precioussssssssss!!!