NHL superstars All-Star Weekend dominance provides tantalizing glimpse to other future big events
TORONTO Connor McDavid emerged as the $1 million winner in Fridays Skills Competition. Auston Matthews emerged with the MVP award after his team won Saturdays three-on-three tournament.
Can we just drop the puck now for USA-Canada in the Four Nations Tournament next winter? Do we have to wait before the two preeminent centers if you insist, two preeminent players face off for their respective countries in Milan in the 2026 Games?
If you want the faces of your league to also be the faces of your All-Star extravaganza, then Toronto was the place to be for this years midseason celebration. Thats what it was. And thats what it was because the players bought in.
I mean, its ultimately up to the fans what they think but we were here to put on a show and I feel like we did that, McDavid, a Toronto native, said. I think it was entertaining for everybody right from the draft on.
Its been a great weekend. Its been a working weekend and tiring weekend. Im looking forward to getting back to Edmonton and to our regularly scheduled program.
3OIlers’ Connor McDavid of Team McDavid NHLI via Getty ImagesYou would be, too, if your team were on a 16-game winning streak with a shot to tie the league record Tuesday in Vegas, as are the Oilers.
McDavid, whose goal with 5.4 seconds remaining in regulation sent the first game into a shootout in which his team coached by Peter Laviolette was everywhere at this event. He was on the dais for the announcement that the NHL would return to the Olympics.
A longtime advocate of bringing best-on-best back to hockey, No. 97 was more than a bystander in the process of making that happen.
3Auston Matthews NHLI via Getty ImagesThe players have a voice and theyre using it, McDavid said after taking the Skills Competition. I think thats good.
It will be interesting to see what kind of a role, if any, McDavid assumes in regard to collective bargaining with the current agreement expiring following the 2025-26 season. A pro sports union is always at its strongest when its most prominent players take visible and lead roles.
Thats a ways away, though.
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Folks have been complaining about the irrelevance of All-Star Games for decades. A baseball All-Star Game ended in a tie because the teams had run out of pitchers. I mean, isnt the Pro Bowl going to flag football this time around?
But youd have to be a professional scold to find much fault with the NHL All-Star presentation here this week that culminated with Saturdays entertaining three-on-three tournament in which Team Matthews took the crown by defeating Team McDavid in a 7-4 final after each of the first-round games was decided by a shootout.
Well, Michael Buble was an unmitigated trainwreck at Thursdays player draft, but thats hardly on the league.
This was an exhibition, of course it was, no one was going 1,000 miles an hour and there was essentially no body contact on the ice. But no one not even Nikita Kucherov, who embraced his identity as a villain after his inexplicable half-hearted effort in Fridays skills competition that drew jeers for two days lollygagged in this one.
The One Million Dollar prize to the winning team didnt hurt. Vincent Trocheck, a member of the championship squad, noted that.
I think it was a mix of both pretty much the whole time, the Blueshirts center said when asked when fun turned into focusing on the win. Obviously, its a lot of money but you dont want to go too hard, you dont want anybody to get hurt in these kinds of games where you just want to have fun.
3 Michael Buble of Team Hughes reacts from behind the bench. NHLI via Getty ImagesBut you want to win.
I dont know that there is a larger meaning to take away from this midseason interlude to a long, winding and grinding 82-game road. Folks in the building enjoyed Thursdays PWHL three-on-three showcase. The Fan Fair seemed to hit it out of the park, drawing lines two city blocks long at times. Diversity was part of the program in disparate venues across the city of Toronto.
Once upon a time, All-Star Games were romanticized. Back in the day, players were not overexposed as is now generally the case. So these events seemed more special.
Except when I went to the 1973 NHL All-Star Game at the Garden as a fan sitting in the original Section 419, the player introductions were the best part of the night and became even better when Bobby Orr wiped out as he skated onto the ice. After that, though, the game was a letdown.
The East won, Greg Polis scored a couple of goals and won the MVP and, for whatever reason, Blueshirts GM Emile Francis became transfixed with the St. Louis winger. Indeed, the Cat acquired Polis over the summer of 1974 in exchange for a first-rounder and Lawrence Sacharuk. Polis was as much a disappointment as a Ranger as the All-Star Game itself.
This event was no disappointment. The NHL put on a good show.
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