You might remember this post from back in mid-September when a Red Wings fan on Twitter came to us asking for help reaching a goal the Wings had set out for him:
RETWEET PLEASE to help me get a free jersey from @DetroitRedWings pic.twitter.com/MrUEY47P3P
— Jimmy St.Denis (@JamesStDenis35) September 9, 2015
We mentioned at the time that putting a 10K RT ask for something is basically asking the impossible for somebody with fewer than two million followers (i.e. most of us), but we agreed to help Jimmy if he agreed to let us pick the player. We put that up to a vote and tried our darndest. Unfortunately, even our darndest wasn’t enough to get him particularly close.
Fortunately, the Wings came through in a big way after being asked to maybe reconsider how hard it is to get to that level.
S/O to the @detroitredwings for sending a jersey A signed puck and tickets THANK U #lgrw #gowings https://t.co/SdWkDJrM9V
— Jimmy St.Denis (@JamesStDenis35) October 9, 2015
Now, I wouldn’t expect asking the Wings for free stuff is going to get much of a response in the future, as they’d quickly go broke if they just gave all this stuff away to anybody who asked them, but it’s a great gesture to show that they’re not heartless.
Sadly for us, the fact that the Wings decided to give him a jersey means that WIIM had absolutely no say in which player’s name and number showed up on it. That’s probably not a bad thing though, since this is the internet and the internet is known to be mean to people they don’t know getting stuff they’re not getting. Still, I was interested in the voting results because it proved that all of you aren’t nearly as evil as random people might otherwise call you.
So there’s no suspense, yes, Dan Cleary received the most votes. However, he only beat Tomas Tatar by three measly votes. What’s more, the next three-highest vote-getters were Petr Mrazek, Pavel Datsyuk, and Dylan Larkin.
In taking count of which votes were mean and which were nice, the nice votes beat out the mean votes by a better than 3-to-2 margin. I’d say that’s a success for an internet poll if ever there was one. So congrats to Jimmy for the cool stuff, congrats to the Red Wings for taking care of things, and congrats to the majority of you for reinforcing my faith in humanity. A win-win all around!
