The Community Vote closed on Monday morning just before we revealed our number 25, the tabulation is done, and it’s time to reveal some of your choices. Because of the way the voting software works, there’s not really any unranked names of the list for the Community Vote, so instead there are 20 honourable mentions who didn’t get enough votes to rank in the list.
The order can be a little wonky because people didn’t necessarily pay a lot of attention to where they placed players outside their personal top 25. But here are the 20 players you couldn’t find a spot for on your lists from the lowest ranked to the player who landed at number 26, Filip Král:
- Wyatt Schingoethe
- John Fusco
- Ryan Tverberg
- Joe Miller
- Michael Koster
- Vyacheslav Peksa
- Semyon Kizimov
- Kalle Loponen
- William Villeneuve
- Ryan O’Connell
- Axel Rindell
- Alex Steeves
- Ty Voit
- Vladislav Kara
- Nikolai Chebykin
- Artur Akhtyamov
- Vladimir Bobylev
- Dmitri Ovchinnikov
- Ian Scott
- Filip Král/
There were 540 responses to tabulate, up considerably from last winter. Because there’s so many voters, unusual voting patterns can’t skew the ranking unduly. William Villeneuve got one vote each in 10th and 11th place, and two in 12th, etc. but he’s not on your Top 25 because of that. Most of his rankings were well below 25th.
This marks the difference between 10 opinions and 540 opinions. The minority ideas get smoothed out quickly in the Community Vote, and this number of votes is enough to drown out the almost 100 people who did rank Villeneuve somewhere in the top 25. The majority rules.
In the Official Vote, the individual has more say, while in the Community Vote the ideas and beliefs of the voters are smoothed out by the masses clustering around the conventional wisdom. The masses vs a small unrepresentative sample of Leafs fans is the best part of this event (after the arguing). Consensus depends on how big a crowd you have providing input, and this is a vivid illustration.
Next weekend, we’ll reveal your 25 through 21 choices and compare them to ours, and the surprise is that one of them is the same.
Thank you to everyone who voted this year, particularly considering how many very unknown players we all ended up ranking.
