Pekka Rinne pulled off the upset – not on the ice but in cyberspace.
The goalie from small-market Nashville knocked off his counterpart from the nation’s largest media market, the New York Rangers’ Henrik Lundqvist, in EA Sports NHL13’s Cover Vote, an NCAA tournament-style bracket pitting player against player to land the cover of the home video game.
Voting closed at 11:59 p.m. on Wednesday and on Thursday EA Sports and NHL.com announced that Rinne had advanced to the semifinals, along with the New York Islanders’ John Tavares, Pittsburgh’s Evgeni Malkin and Philadelphia’s Claude Giroux.
Some teams, like Rinne’s Predators, have mounted social media campaigns. Some like ex-Predator Scott Hartnell of Philadelphia have taken to YouTube for a mock presidential-style commercial complete with a waving U.S. flag in the background (Hartnell is Canadian) and the disclaimer, “I’m Scott Hartnell and I approved this message;” the video has received more than 28,000 views. Behind the scenes, there is said to be reality-TV style alliances in the making between some teams in favor of their candidates.
In Rinne’s case, he downed his second straight opponent from a big market – nothing new to the Predators on the ice -- after ousting Chicago’s Patrick Sharp in the last round. Like Rinne, Lundqvist is one of the three finalists for the Vezina Trophy, which is given each year to the league’s top goaltender, as voted on by its general managers. Lundqvist also suffered defeat on the ice on Wednesday in one of his worst efforts in what has otherwise been a stellar Stanley Cup Playoffs for the Swede, who has posted shutouts in his team’s two victories in the current round. The Rangers trail New Jersey, 3-2, in the Eastern Conference finals after New York lost Game 5 of the Eastern Conference finals 4-3 when Lundqvist yielded three first-period goals.
Despite Lundqvist seemingly holding the advantage of playing in the larger media market, Rinne held his own throughout. As of 10:46 a.m. Eastern on Wednesday, EASportsNHL’s Twitter feed indicated that Rinne was in the lead.
“I think with Lundqvist being in the New York media market, with his team being in the playoffs, with some of the notoriety he’s been able to gain in Sweden with a lot of the games he’s played for the international team (winning an Olympic gold medal in 2006), I think it appeared at the start that the deck was maybe stacked a little bit against us,” said Jay Levin, the Predators’ manager of interactive marketing who happens to be from metropolitan New York. “I guess in a fan voting like this, it’s hard to say an upset one way or another, but when you consider a lot of those factors, I think it appeared as if Lundqvist maybe had an easier route.”
Regardless of which player wins out, the campaign has proved a public relations victory for the league. The voting started with 60 players and now, 19.5 million votes have been cast, according to a news release. When EA Sports first took its popular NFL Madden game public for this kind of vote for the game’s ’11 edition, 13 million votes were cast during a similar campaign.
The opposite side of the bracket from Rinne’s already had been decided before Thursday. Giroux emerged over Los Angeles’ Anze Kopitar and Malkin bested Hartnell in a match-up between two of the league’s fiercest rivals. In the other match-up on Rinne’s side of the bracket, Tavares, who was a beneficiary of a YouTube video made by his teammate Michael Grabner, downed Detroit’s Pavel Datsyuk.
The next round of voting will end on May 28. Voting between the finalists concludes on June 4 but the winner will not be announced until the league’s awards ceremony in Las Vegas on June 20.
With Rinne having prevailed against Lundqvist, the Preds promise to use their wiles in the semifinals.
“I would imagine heading into next round that will be a strategy to the game,” Levin said of alliance-making. “We’ve already started to reach out in case.”
