NHL All-Star Game: What’s wrong with it and how to fix it
The NHL All-Star game has been a puzzle the league has been trying to solve for several decades now.
What once was an event that players were honored to be chosen for has deteriorated into a “chore” for the participants and a mid-season vacation for the rest.
Fans used to enjoy watching the best-of-the-best take the ice for the same team. Now it’s an afterthought at best, an interruption of “real” hockey at worst.
Where did things go wrong?
From Humble Beginnings
The first ever All-Star game actually predates the National Hockey League.
After former Montreal Wanderers player Hod Stuart drowned in 1907, the Wanderers played against a team of all-stars from the Eastern Canada Amateur Hockey Association.
The proceeds from the game were donated to Stuart’s family.
First Official NHL All-Star Game
The first official NHL All-Star game was played at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto on October 13th, 1947.
The game was played before the start of the NHL season.
The format consisted of the previous season’s Stanley Cup Champions facing off against a team of players from the remaining five teams.
This version of the NHL All-Star game remained until 1969.
Players on the All-Star team obviously wanted to beat the Champs, and that made for games that were very competitive.
In addition, to be chosen to participate in the event signified that you were among the game’s best.
The Modern Version
Today, players are selected by a combination of fans voting for six players from each conference while the NHL chooses the rest.
This is an obvious attempt to have fans involved in the process in order to draw more sponsorship and advertising dollars for the event. The problem with fan voting is that it’s limitless: any fan can vote as many times as he/she wants for the same players.
That’s how we end up with starting lineups comprised entirely of players from teams in big markets, or of players who otherwise shouldn’t be there.
This season took things to a ridiculous level, as five of the top six vote-getters were Blackhawks (Jonathan Toews, Patrick Kane, Duncan Keith, Brent Seabrook & Corey Crawford). The sixth player was Sabres forward Zemgus Girgensons.
While they’re all good players, there are several others having much better seasons, and thus more deserving of a starting lineup nod, than all but one (Kane).
While fans in Chicago (and Girgenson’s parents) may enjoy this turn of events, the rest of the hockey world sees this as the ultimate failure of the current system and the latest reason the NHL All-Star game has become a bit of a farce.
What to do?
The NHL All-Star game, or any major sports league’s all-star game, will never resemble a competitive regular season or *gasp* playoff game. It’s time everyone just accepted that and tried instead to make it something worth watching, and worth participating in, for different reasons.
But how can we make one game where nothing of true value is won meaningful enough for fans and players to care?
There are several ideas.
The most intriguing one was to create a sort of “Champions’ League” tournament to replace it.
While I would love to see the Stanley Cup Champions face off against the playoff victors of the KHL, Swedish Elite League and other top European leagues, it simply isn’t realistic.
For that to even be logistically possible however, it would have to take place in the summer, when most players need the time off after 82 or more games played, or before the season when injuries could wreak havoc for their club teams.
Another thought I’ve seen tossed around is to have a team of NHL All-Stars play against their KHL counterparts. Another intriguing idea, but not without one major hurdle: injuries.
If you play this type of game at mid-season, the injury risks to players from contending teams would be too great. Keep in mind the KHL players would be very motivated to prove their superiority and thus would play a hard, competitive game, increasing that risk for the NHLers.
Ideas that make the game more competitive carry too great a risk. Whether it’s on the ice or financially, the impact of an injury to a star player would not be something the NHL or the NHLPA would ever be comfortable with.
So the solution is to retain the best-on-best format. We simply have to accept the game itself will be a show of skill and speed, and not your typical grinder’s game full of big hits, dump-and-chase puck races and board battles.
Not much can be done to the format, but how the event is structured and presented is where the biggest repair job is needed, and possible.
This is not American Idol
First, we need to revise the fan voting system.
There’s nothing wrong using fan voting as a method for selecting players to the NHL All-Star game. The way it’s done however leaves a lot to be desired.
Let’s put some type of limit on how many times a single person can vote.
These days, it would be easy enough to ask fans to use their Facebook, Twitter, Google or any other online account to “log in” and vote.
Live Feed
A Winning Habit
This would not only give the NHL access to fans’ information for future marketing use, but it would give them a way to track the amount of votes logged from each user.
In addition, each fan can be asked to select their favorite team upon their initial log in. That could also serve as a filter for which players that fan can vote for.
If every fan got to vote a limited amount of times for players from only their “favorite” team, this would help to reduce ballot box stuffing. The league could select a finite number of deserving players from each team to be on their club’s ballot.
Are you a Blackhawks fan and want to use up all your votes on Hawks players? Fine. But you either get to vote five times for Patrick Kane or once each for five different players, for example.
Then, the top vote getter from each team makes it to the All-Star game. That satisfies the NHL’s obsession with having at least one representative from each market, while simultaneously ensuring that players who make it are deserving.
That’s 30 out of 42 spots filled. For the rest, the NHLPA could have a vote of its own to fill out the remaining 12.
That would give the players the opportunity to be involved and recognize their peers for outstanding seasons. I would think that type of recognition would be somewhat more meaningful for them then a popularity contest.
What about the game itself?
Once the teams are assembled, we still have a game to play.
It will remain a skill/speed game of course, but there are ways to make it matter a little more, for players and fans alike.
One idea would be to mimic what baseball does and give the winning conference home-ice advantage in the Stanley Cup Final.
Another interesting suggestion is to have each player “play” for a charity and base donations off of performance (i.e. the NHL donates $1000 for every goal that player scores, $1000 to each of the winning team’s players’ charities, etc).
Hockey players are known to be some of the more generous athletes with both their time and their wallets, and I believe they’d give a little extra effort if it meant it would help someone in need.
I also love the concept of making it the annual Winter Classic outdoor game, which has been toyed with.
My favorite idea for the NHL All-Star game though has nothing to do with any of that. It has to do with how we, as fans, take it all in.
Sure, I’d hate to watch 82 games every season played the way these games are played. But I can also appreciate seeing the incredible skill on display and cringe every time the NHL fails to encourage players to show it off.
The NHL All-Star game is the only time, aside from perhaps the Winter Classic games, where you see hockey players forget that they make millions and remember how much fun it is to play the game.
With that comes a willingness to try things that would get them benched on their regular teams, but that have the potential to pull fans out of their seats.
There are many things wrong with the way the NHL All-Star game is marketed and structured. Those things need work.
But I submit that the game itself can be enjoyed for what it is: a platform for the NHL’s elite to show us that they love playing this game, and for the incredible things they can do on the ice when they don’t have someone trying to take their heads off.
Why is that so wrong?