Jaromir Jagr spoke, but the fans didn’t listen.
Back on Dec. 2, the 43-year-old star playfully pleaded his case to not be voted into the 2016 All-Star Game:
Well, as we found out earlier Saturday, it didn’t work. After tallying fan votes, Jagr was appointed captain of the Atlantic Division team. Alex Ovechkin (Metropolitan), Patrick Kane (Central) and John Scott (Pacific) were named captains of the three other divisions.
The announcement was quickly followed up by another funny tweet from the All-Star veteran:
Though the tweet is funny in nature, Sportsnet’s Damien Cox questioned if Jagr might be serious about his All-Star doubts.
In other words, could Jagr skip the All-Star Game?
“In the NHL, there’s a bit of a precedent that if he doesn’t show, they’d have to suspend him for a game,” explained Cox during Saturday’s Headlines segment on Hockey Night in Canada. “They’re going to monitor this over the next couple of weeks … to see how adamant he is on that stance.”
If Jagr is, in fact, considering bowing out, it wouldn’t be the first time a player turned down the game — citing injury or otherwise.
Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin were two of the biggest names to decline participation in the game last year, due to injury. You might also remember Ovechkin pulling out of the 2012 edition, saying he was “not deserving to be there” as he was in the midst of serving a three-game suspension at the time.
As for players being punished for sitting out the game, Detroit Red Wings Pavel Datsyuk and Nicklas Lidstrom both served a one-game suspension of sorts for opting out in order to rest in preparation for the playoffs in 2009. The NHL had recently implement a rule that players must prove they’re really injured by sitting out a game just before or after the All-Star event.
