"I have no idea what is going on!" My friend Kenny exclaimed while trying to make heads or tails out of the scoring system of the NHL's Super Skills Competition at the 56th All-Star game, held this weekend in Atlanta.
"Clearly they don't either." I wittily replied.
The production value and the overall organization of the night, that should be about celebrating some of the amazing skills that these players possess, was not worth the cable bill it would take to watch it.
Gone are the days when the NHL was broadcast on ESPN and ABC, even the glow-puck FOX robot goal graphics were missed. Vs just cannot handle something of the All-Star game's calibre.
Commentary was sparse, graphics were wrong, events were poorly explained and players were forgotten. There were times where 7-10 seconds of dead air would be followed by a discussion of how confused the two authorities were.
Doc Emmerich is a legend. He's brilliant at calling games, or at least he was when he used to actually talk about the games. However, his partner in crimes against hockey, Eddie Olczyk is a 2-bit coach with an 8-bit vocabulary. They were even more lost than their audience at times.
As if the commentary and presentation wasn't bad enough, the events themselves were over-complicated, dumbed-down and favoritist in regards to the obstacle course, the fastest skater and the one-on-one shootout, respectively.
First off, the new event, the obstacle course, sounded good on paper. It combined stick-handling, passing, shooting and the ever intriguing goaltender shots. However, there was no one camera angle that could present all of the action, nor was there one for each different part of the competition that captured it without giving the viewer vertigo. But I hope fans of lesser-known All-Stars payed attention because it was the only time they got to see their respective team's players.
If it ain't broke don't fix it. For some reason VS decided to throw on their tool belts (pun intended)and messed with the fastest skater portion of the night. Hiding behind the phantom cries that certain players are more comfortable turning right or left, the NHL has made this event a dead sprint. Players go from goal line to opposite blue line. One would assume that if both players are told to go at the same time, the first one across the blue line would be the winner. And yet, when Craig Conroy of the Buffalo Sabres got beat off the line like Harrison Ford in American Graffiti, he won the heat. Go figure.
Finally the last event of the night should have been called the Ryan Getzlaff, Alexander Ovechkin show. Now don't get me wrong, I love watching these to guys try to come up with a bunch of crazy moves. However, there was only one goal scored in the entire event, off of a regular shot from Ovie, and there were only (If I remember correctly) 6 players involved.
I am a Flyers fan. Kimmo Timonen and Mike Richards earned spots onto the Eastern Conference team. They play hard and are fun to watch. Timonen got to take two breakaway shots (and scored on one of them). Richards got to pass a puck over a board into a tiny net. Thank you NHL for letting two of my favorite players be horribly, horribly underused in a celebratory event of skill and sportsmanship.
When I was younger, I used to love to watch the skill competition, watch John LeClair try his hand at the hardest shot, watch Jeremy Roenick blast 4 out of 4 targets in the accuracy test, watch Marty Brodeur make some unbelievable saves on even more unbelievable moves in the break out event.
This year I was thoroughly disappointed from start to finish with the production, revision and bias of the entire event. It's this kind of debacle that gives the NHL such a bad reputation among the sports community. I was embarrassed to be a fan of the league. If you can't promote your best players and entertain with their unnatural talents then there is something wrong with the network and the league officials that are in charge of the event.
