Survey Says...

Earlier this year, ESPN conducted its annual NHL Players survey and some of the results were pretty entertaining.   Fifty NHL players were selected at random to take the survey.  The survey consisted of 30 questions that ranged from favorite players to favorite refs to favorite groupies.

I found a blog that mentioned the survey but published the ten questions that seemed to have been overlooked when bloggers reported the results.  Some of these questions included:  “The players are currently hiring a new head for the player's association. What is the most important qualification that your ideal candidate would have?” “Which team would you least like to be playing for?” and “What's the single most important thing a hockey player can accomplish during their career?”

For the first question mentioned above, 68% of respondents didn’t know that they had a players association.  For the next question, 59% of respondents said they did not want to play for the team that had to play the Red Wings in the first round of the playoffs, and for the last question, 38% of respondents said that the single most important thing a player can accomplish is being traded out of Edmonton.  The next popular answer was to win a Stanley Cup Championship, with 23% of respondents saying that.

I also found a blog from Yahoo! Sports that mentions results from some of the questions that were originally reported.  Some of the results that I found interesting (and hysterical) were: the city with best groupies, who had the hottest spouse and have you been approached to fix the outcome of the game.  The players voted Montreal as the city with the best groupies with a 42% of responses, followed by Vancouver.  Almost half of those surveyed responded with “no comment” to who had the hottest wife and when asked about being approached to fix the outcome of a game, three players responded with “no comment.”  (Could this possibly be interpreted as yes?  I’m thinking it’s a high possibility).

While the results of this survey provided comic relief to fans, it also helps to provide insight to the NHL.  The results allowed the NHL to see the opinions of players without having to conduct their own research.  Even though some of the answers were meant to be comedic, some brought up issues that perhaps the NHL should look at, such as 68% of those players surveyed didn’t realize they had a player’s association.  This could be interpreted literally or more so to mean that they association doesn’t do enough for players to realize their dominant presence.  The survey also provided a free mention of the specific players, teams, and referees mentioned in responses.