We talk a lot about hockey and the NHL around here because, well, everything would be better if it were hockey.* But one hockey-related thing we can't muster up much of a chubby** for is the NHL All-Star Game. Most years the NHL's All-Star game is an offense-only place where goalies go to burn burn burn for all eternity, not dissimilar from the eternal fiery damnation of intelligent sports analysis in a Jay Mariotti column.
All-Star games in general are just not a good idea anymore, if they ever were. With the possible exception of baseball where injuries often come from over-use and can be minimized without ruining a game, hockey, football and basketball require varying levels of contact meaning every game contains a risk of severe injury. Hockey features some of the larger moments of contact which can and do result in injuries. When you give it a modicum of thought, the multi-million dollar contracts lavished on today's athletes make any exhibition an exercise in stupidity.
How horrific for the NHL in general and the Washington Capitals franchise in specific would it be if Alex Ovechkin (with his 13 year, $124 million contract) suffered some sort of serious (or really even non-serious) injury during the all-star game? Where is the incentive for the Capitals or Penguins to allow their $100 million players to participate in an exhibition? Any reasonable fan of a team would be happy if none of its players were chosen to participate.
It is true that hockey and basketball (unlike football) can both be played with a more laid-back style (i.e. without defense) that minimizes the risk of injury, but the end result is a bastardization of the game where offense is boosted to ridiculous levels. Yes, we all like scoring (only one reason soccer is so damn boring), but it's lame and pointless to select the best defensemen in the game and then anchor them to the ice for sixty minutes while the most talented shooters and scorers skate around them like cones in a driving test and make the best goalies in the game look like they're still mites on ice.
Maybe they care about it in Canada (actually, I'm sure they do), but by taking intelligent injury prevention measures the All-Star game becomes a carnival barring little relation to what makes ice hockey and the NHL so amazing and fun. Basically you either risk injury for no reason or you play something that barely resembles NHL-level ice hockey. So, to answer the title question, in a perfect world the league would just take a week off to refresh its players and skip this exercise in ridiculousness.
*Baseball, poon and "Weird Al" albums excepted, of course.
**By which I mean "penis"
1 comments:
I couldn't agree more. I couldn't watch a single minute of that crapfest. Which means I watched a few seconds, but couldn't even make it a full minute. Horrible and totally irrelevant.
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