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Is it time to retire the NHL all-star game?
After watching the soft, no-contact spectacle in Atlanta on Sunday, several commentators believe the game is giving hockey a bad name.
"It's one thing not to hit," said Steve Kouleas, hockey anchor with The Score Television Network. "But surely they could check and show some competitiveness. And the overpassing, it almost makes a mockery of it."
Overpassing, in which players make three or four cute little passes around the net before a shot is taken (something that would never happen in a real game), also bothered Nick Kypreos of Rogers Sportsnet. "You saw it ad nauseam," he said.
"Everybody got a free pass," said Jeff Marek, host of Hockey Night in Canada Radio on Sirius Radio. "I've seen shinny games that were more aggressive than that.
"The thing that disappoints me is, the all-star game is supposed to attract new fans, casual fans. But it presents an entirely different product than what the NHL game is."
The problem isn't just that the all-star game is a weak representation of the real thing. But it's getting worse. The games 15 years ago were played at a higher level of competitiveness. "Something's changed since the 1990s," Kouleas said.
What's changed, TSN commentator Glenn Healy says, is the regular season, which is more competitive now.
"You look at the schedule today and how much parity there is, and how tough points are to get," Healy said. "These guys are on the hook from June, when they start working out, to the last weekend of the regular season. And then you tack on the Olympics and the world championships. It's a grind."
The all-star game wasn't the only bust on the weekend. The league mishandled the new shootout competition.
TSN's James Duthie, who suggested the idea to the NHL a few weeks ago, noted the title, Breakaway Challenge, did not describe what the competition was about.
What's more, the competitors didn't understand the rules and were foiled at least once by San Jose Sharks Evgeni Nabokov, who skated out of his crease to poke-check the puck carrier. The purpose of the competition was to showcase the shooters, not the goalies.
As the CBC's Greg Millen noted, the goaltenders should have been restricted to the crease. Duthie wonders if goalies were even needed.
And most of the veterans who participated didn't have the required skills or personalities to put on a show. Young hot shots and some of the stars in junior hockey should have been invited to compete.
Fixing the game
Healy says the league, concerned about the quality of the all-star game, is pondering changes.
"They wouldn't say it publicly, but I know privately they're scratching their heads to figure out how to make the game competitive," he said.
Hockey players, famously tight-fisted, need a cash incentive, Healy said.
To that end, Kouleas says make the purse large — $100,000 to each member of the winning team.
"I talked to [former NHL player] Matthew Barnaby about it," Kouleas said. "If there was $100,000 per player in the stalls, 'believe me,' he said, 'to pay off the wives' credit-card bills, they'd get into the game.' "
Instead of the Eastern Conference playing the Western, make it Canada versus the rest of the world, Kouleas said.
From Marek: Why not play the all-star game outdoors? "If it's going to be shinny, do it on the pond."
Bill Watters of Sportsnet and AM640 Toronto radio says return to the old set-up of the defending Stanley Cup champions playing an all-star squad early in the season.
Healy and Kouleas said some of the skills contests need to be eliminated. "Goalies shooting into empty nets?" Kouleas said. "Is that where we're at?"
Duthie says keep the Breakaway Challenge, but give it an appropriate name, make the required changes, and also get the crowd involved by giving spectators cards on which they can grade the performances.
All-star numbers
The CBC's audiences for the Saturday NHL all-star skills session and the game on Sunday were down slightly from 2007. The Saturday audience was 1.030 million, compared with 1.096 million a year ago. The game drew 1.163 million, compared with 1.31 million in 2007.
In the United States, Versus earned a 0.76 overnight cable rating (percentage of potential households tuned in), up from 0.54 last year.
