Wednesday, June 22, 2016

What Awards Show?

"The music industry is lying to you
it is telling you that you are excited
and you ARE excited
and you ARE excited

Or rather you have confused excitement,
with the fear of missing out.
Which is understandable as these two feelings
are very closely related!"

- Singing of the Bonesaws by Future of the Left

Okay, this isn't about the music industry, but it rings very true in just about every form of entertainment.  How sad.

The long-standing tradition of the NHL awards is something that I once had great respect for, but that respect has fallen to the wayside, much like many of the other award shows of our time.  With the NHL awards, there is a great history about the awards themselves, the players/coaches/managers that the awards have been named after, the long-standing list of NHL greats who have won the awards and their lasting legacy in fan conversation.

My biggest contention and the reason why I haven't watched the awards in a number of years is the wording of the awards and what the process is to determine that may or many not determine the most accurate depiction of said wording.

The awards, which are not based on actual statistical achievements, are based on a voting process, by a select group of hockey writers and it's a poorly kept secret that there are a good number of those voters who will offer up their personal bias for these awards, which really skews the process of determining who the best in a certain category is.

There are long-standing debates in this day and age, especially when it comes to the Norris Trophy, for instance, about who should be considered to be voted the NHL's best defenseman annually.  First of all, the wording of the trophy is ridiculously ambiguous, which offers up a debate within itself and then the debate about who it should be gets even more muddy.  When you offer up something or someone as being the best, the determination of that distinction should be anything but muddy, in my opinion.

I think both Erik Karlsson and Drew Doughty have merits for being considered the best defenseman in the NHL and I would even throw Brent Burns into that mix as well, but they all play in slightly different styles, so how do you decide?  Sure, leave it up to a group of writers from all kinds of NHL cities, where exposure is limited of some players in some markets.

However, there is one trophy that the winner is voted for that actually has some merit... the Ted Lindsay Award.  The Lindsay is award to the the league's most valuable player, according to his peers, voted on by the players themselves.  That's a distinction worth talking about, since they are the ones who are playing the game and know who is who in this argument.  I wish this award carried a little bit more distinction, but the media doesn't have their fingers in this pie, so why should they boast about it?

Obviously, the NHL doesn't really give a sweet fuck about these sorts of things, because their hype machine works overtime to make sure that you know about the awards and they rile up everyone into a slight frenzy and it's good for business to have these sorts of debates, because it means that everyone is paying attention to their product and talking about it.

All the glitz, the glamour, the B & C-level celebrities... that's just the curdled cream and cherry pit on the shit sundae that is the awards show.  I think that's a whole different post for a different time though.

Sure, my points are just piling on to a giant dung pile of crap that won't be considered by anyone and things are not likely to change in my lifetime, but with the marketing of this shit show going overboard over the last couple of days, really brings the opinions up to the surface.  I had a few minutes, so I thought I would just jot them down and feel a little bit better about not watching the awards again this year.

I wouldn't say I was missing it, Bob.