Faceoff Factor

Crosby wins ESPY for Best NHL Player

Ashley Gallant | Pittsburgh Penguins

Jul 22, 09:51 AM | Hype this story!

You are a hockey fan, well aware of everything that went on in the 2007-08 season. You are now presented with a list of five players and you have to choose which one was the best:

Sidney Crosby
Alexander Ovechkin
Evgeni Malkin
Jarome Iginla
Pavel Datsyuk

Who do you pick?

This was the task being given to ESPY voters. They chose Sidney Crosby as the Best NHL Player last season, and they got it wrong.

It’s a little hard to write that because, if not for the injury, I believe that he definitely would have been one of the best in the League and may have even taken the Art Ross. But, the injury happened and he missed a good part of the season, allowing other players to shine. You could make a good argument that Sid wasn’t even the best player on the team this year, so why should he be given the Best NHL Player award?

You can blame ESPN for a lot of things related to hockey, and you could blame them for putting Crosby’s name on the ballot in the first place, but you can’t blame them for selecting Crosby. That blame lies solely on the shoulders of the fans who voted this year.

When you look at it from that perspective – that the fans voted for the winners – it is not surprising at all that Crosby won.

This is just a guess here, but I get the feeling that most voters do not care one lick about hockey. A good portion of them could probably count, on one hand, the number of hockey players that they have ever heard about.

Take another look at the list above and think about how they are marketed by the NHL. You could immediately cross off Iginla and Datsyuk because I don’t think that they are players on the radars of non-hockey fans. You could cross off Malkin, too, since his limited English makes it hard to use him in marketing the game.

You now have Crosby and Ovechkin. Although Ovechkin’s English has certainly improved in the last three years, and he has a personality loved by many, Crosby is still the face of the NHL. If you had to select only one player that the NHL uses to market the game to non-hockey fans, I think you would have to say it was Crosby.

If you look at it from that perspective, then it’s probable that many/most ESPY voters looked at the list of nominees and either a) recognized only Crosby’s name or b) thought that since Crosby is the most well-known player, then he must be the best player.

I understand the concept of voting that way because I do it to other sports. I don’t know the first thing about football, so when I look at the list of nominees for Best NFL Player (Brady, Moss, Tomlinson, Sanders, Favre, and E. Manning), I would likely vote for Tom Brady just because he was the one I heard the most about last season. In fact, I’ve never even heard of Bob Sanders, and the only time I’ve heard Ladainian Tomlinson’s name is at the ESPYs.

Or how about the nominees for Best MLS Player? David Beckham is the only player I know.

And if I was voting for college athletes, I would have to get the finger out and play a game of ‘eenie-meenie-miney-mo’, because I have never heard of any of those athletes.

That’s the problem when fans have to vote for an award – sometimes they don’t know the first thing about the sport in question and they vote based on who they know or who has the best-sounding name, not on who was ‘the best’ that year.