Only Major League Baseball’s All-Star game is ‘important’ because it affects who will have home field advantage throughout the playoffs. Therefore, all other sports need to find a way to make their game more interesting. The NFL holds their game in Hawaii, but who can honestly say they enjoy watching it? The game just features a game of pitch and catch between the quarterbacks and wide receivers. You never see a defensive player laying out on opposing offense player – except for the game a few years ago when Sean Taylor laid out the opposing punter – or much activity between the linemen. They might as well not even be there.
This year, the NHL held a fantasy draft dubbing two All-Stars captains. It turned it into a pick-up-like event, which anyone who played any sports on the playground can relate to. This created a buzz because there was no longer just the boring game of East versus West.
Since the game was in Ottawa, Daniel Alfredsson (the Senators’ captain) was automatically a key storyline throughout the game. Team Alfredsson ended up losing the contest to Team Chara 12-9, but Alfredsson supplied the hometown fans with two goals and an assist. He even gave a glimmer of hope that he’d be back for one more season in Ottawa.
The game itself wasn’t your typical hockey game. The defense was pretty much non-existent, but it created a wide-open style game that featured nifty passing plays, odd-man rushes and even a penalty shot.
Even though the hockey sense of the game was all good and fun, NBC had a few players mic’d up to make things more interesting. I found it awesome that the announcers were having full out conversations with Tyler Seguin and Claude Giroux while they were on the ice. This even let the general public watching the game know all about Scott Hartnell’s charity. Someone on Twitter has created ‘#HartnellDown,’ which counts the number of times anything other than Hartnell’s skates or stick hit the ice. Hartnell has embraced this by creating a website for it and said that during the All-Star game, he’d give $X amount to charity each time #HartnellDown occurred. While talking to the announcers, Giroux kept saying he was trying to force his teammate to the ground for the laugh, and to help the cause.
All these little twists made the NHL All-Star game a great show for all fans. But what did it do for the league? I’d really like to hear how the ratings for the game were. It just so happened that the Pro Bowl was on the same day, and it’s interesting to see which game had a greater viewership. All I know is that ESPN must have forgotten the NHL even existed since Sidney Crosby is still sidelined with his post-concussion syndrome. Their clip on ‘SportsCenter’ of the NHL All-Star game was all of 1:30. Any other sport, (especially the NBA) would probably get a minimum of five minutes with an additional half hour of analysis.
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