The 2015 Honda NHL All-Star Game In Columbus saw Team Toews top Team Foligno by a score of 17-12.That’s right… we saw a total of 29 goals, an NHL record for an All-Star game. And yet, the All-Star game and the entire weekend for that matter seems to always carry with it a certain sense of malaise and boredom to it, much like the NBA’s version of the festivities, or any league’s version for that matter.
There are a few key reasons for that and one of them is that the players simply don’t take it seriously and they probably never will. Yes the winning team gets more money for winning the game and the MVP of the game gets a brand-new car, but NHL All-Stars don’t exactly need extra money in their wallets or an extra SUV or pickup truck.
Another big reason for the boredom is that more goals don’t necessarily mean more excitement… just means more stoppages in play. Couple that with the fact that the game itself lacks any sort of intensity at all, and the event becomes more of a glorified scrimmage rather than a display of the best in the world performing at their best. Any hockey fan that wants to see the NHL at its best knows that the best hockey occurs during the Stanley Cup Playoffs and no matter what the league does to try to make the All-Star game more exciting, that’s always going to be the case.
And then of course there is the rest of the All-Star weekend, the skills competition. Again much like the NBA, it seems these days that most fans would rather watch the skills competition than the All-Star game, simply because you get to see players compete in various facets of the game that don’t often get displayed outside of practice, which makes it a little bit more intriguing to take in.
It also seems like there’s a lot more opportunity to joke around, have fun and pump the crowd up during the event. Blue Jackets forward Ryan Johansen skating down the ice with an Ohio State Buckeyes jersey on comes to mind, and so does Jakub Voracek using Johnny Gudreau as a prop to score a goal.
But even with the best effort of the players to bring creativity to the event, the bottom line is there’s only so much you can do with a hockey puck on ice that will continue to wow the crowd every year. The NBA’s slam dunk contest is often seen as the marquee event of the whole weekend, yet there is a discussion every so often about whether it should be put on hiatus for awhile because a slam dunk can only be reinvented in so many ways.
Nevertheless the NHL’s version will continue to be a part of All-Star Weekend along with the rest of the festivities that take place. But rather than try to make the weekend better, perhaps fans should just take the event for what is… a break from the everyday grind of the NHL regular-season schedule and a showcase of cool tricks, gimmicks, and futuristic looking All-Stars jerseys that you would never get to see otherwise.