Mediaboss Marketing

Hooray for us! All that was missing from the 2012 NHL Awards show in Las Vegas was Liberace's jeweled coat.

Isaac Brekken/Getty Images

LAS VEGAS -- Of course, the only word that applies is "absurd" in trying to explain how and why the NHL's Awards show is now staged in this city every year. Months of struggle and work by still mostly small-town prairie boys ends with a coronation in the most garish, un-hockey place on earth: Las Vegas.

The most self-conscious of all major sports, its players taught to never attract the spotlight to themselves, somehow takes its final bow in a place of outlandish, outsized neon self-promotion.

The place where Liberace flaunted his jeweled coat, where Elvis did karate chops in white bell-bottoms, where Mike Tyson once partially bit off a man's ear -- this is where the painfully shy Evgeni Malkin fumbled through his Hart Trophy acceptance speech as the NHL's most valuable player on Wednesday night at the Wynn casino.

Maybe it's not all that surprising though, really. Hockey people work so hard at staying humble 363 days a year in freezing cold rinks, maybe it's only natural that they'd want to put orange lampshades on their heads and slosh around blazing hot sidewalks with open containers for the other two days.

Much like this year's show -- from the baggy-eyed, flat opening monologue of Matthew Perry to the hysterical Brendan Shanahan impersonator sketches -- this whole Vegas hockey act works and ... doesn't.

First off, what worked:

The hockey writers, most of them from beleaguered print outlets, still get to choose who wins the major trophies, and they got things right with the selection of Malkin as the Hart winner. The Penguins center earned it with a fabulous season for a franchise where he probably is still only the third-most popular center in town behind the owner, Mario Lemieux, and the kid, Sidney Crosby.

FARBER & DATER: Comparing our awards ballots

Read more from the original source:
Adrian Dater: Las Vegas sure isn't Hockeytown