All-star festivities fail to impress

Ronald H. Neal
Staff Writer
For years now I have been questioning the appeal and presumed charm of the National Hockey League (NHL), or perhaps more appropriately the National Hockey League Player’s Association (NHLPA), which supports the annual showcase of branding that is the all-star game.
Admittedly, there is a duty served by these games: the sport needs to put on a circus to sell itself in the traditionally crowded and fickle American market.
This year, however, the game felt uninteresting, largely flat and ultimately irrelevant to most sports fans.
The weekend started off with such hope and progress. For starters, the league was taking the event in a totally fresh direction. Instead of, say, having teams split up into conferences, or, sadly, the more contrived alternative of dividing players into teams North America and world, the league opted to name captains in advance and have them draft respective squads from scratch.
What followed was a scene reminiscent of adolescences past, as the rosters of Team Lidstrom and Team Staal were quickly filled out by anxious millionaires waiting and hoping to not be chosen last. Honestly, this was a smash and big coo for both the league and TSN, whose combined efforts consistently excited and refreshed the course of the night.
Any momentum gained, though, was lost less than 24 hours later as metaphor became reality and we found ourselves truly witnessing a circus. To begin, the idea of a super skills competition is awkward enough, but add to it the performance the CBC put on in delivering it to homes across the nation and you’ve a recipe for disaster.
To name only a few problems, the timing of events was consistently off or not displayed, targets were missing or ran out, the crew was clumsy and there were delays when fans were expected to choose winners to certain events, not to mention the fact that most events are no more than a year old and conceptually immature. No one wants to see players shooting pucks into little nets or playing with their sticks upside down; instead people want to see the best in the world play against each other hard and with passion.
The most shocking part of the whole event was probably how viewers eager to give their sport and favourite players a shot at redemption were greeted with a half-hour delay because a curling match went into overtime. If anyone had any doubts about the importance of this event before, they were quickly proven right when CBC thought it best to prioritize a pseudo-sport over the NHL all-star game.
While it was entertaining to see the network scramble to explain themselves and offer compensation, the whole episode was unsurprisingly lame.
To its credit, the CBC nearly redeemed itself and the festivities by throwing down a sweet opening montage set to Metric’s “Stadium Love,” but it wasn’t enough.
Overall, most were left with the same feeling that something probably better was on and that next year we should probably watch that instead.