Acceptance is the key to enjoying today's NHL All-Star games

The most recent and public example of a common sentiment – at least if you follow NHL hockey on a day-to-day basis – came from Philadelphia Flyers head coach John Tortorella, who said this about the upcoming NHL All-Star Game:

It's at the end of that clip where he says, in the nicest way he’s able, that he doesn’t care about the All-Star Game, doesn’t watch, doesn’t give an, um, poop. He even starts a longer answer at one point with “It’s become… “ before trailing off and realizing nothing good comes from torching the league about the game’s evolution.

But that’s what this article is about: accepting what the All-Star Game is, what it isn’t, and what it has become.

What it used to be, was one of the tools we had to measure the careers of good and great players. How many bar stool arguments involve framing like “The guy’s a bum, he never even made an all-star game” or sarcastically, “Yeah you’re right Smitty the guy only made six all-star teams he must suck.”

From 1947 to 2004, there are only two years (according to Wikipedia) where there wasn’t some All-Star style event, so that framing made sense. The best players were selected as best the league could, and it was a career honour to get the nod.

If you take it from 2005 to present, the NHL All-Star Game has been cancelled six times. There was a lockout, then an Olympics, then a lockout (way to go league), then a couple more Olympics (way to go league, sincerely this time!), then a pandemic. That leads to paragraphs like this in the All-Star Game release about Sidney Crosby:

Crosby's ninth All-Star Game selection ties him with Jaromir Jagr for the second-most selections in Penguins history. Only Mario Lemieux (13) has been named to more All-Star Games than Crosby. Crosby was previously named an NHL All Star in 2007, '08, '09, '11, '15, '17, '18 and '19.

You can’t judge Sid’s All-Star Game appearances versus anyone from an earlier era because there haven’t been consistent games. Further to that, is that the way players are selected has changed, with rules that limit the league from taking the best players each season.

Having to take a player from every team eliminates more deserving players, letting fans vote means players can get in for reasons other than merit, and so yeah … we have to let go of the days where “All-Star Game appearances” meant something meaningful.

But also, the NHL suffers from something similar to the NFL, in that games that are full contact and require peak commitment to “accepting pain for gain” cannot be played in a compelling fashion in the absence of said commitment. It became such a lark that the NFL literally abandoned the Pro Bowl, and the NHL has been desperately searching for ways to put an interesting product on the ice for years, more recently landing on 3-on-3 as a solution.

And so there used to be the possibility of real competitive flare-ups, whether in North America vs. the World or East vs. West or whatever the real-style hockey games used to be. Even with financial motivations for the players now, it can be tough to create an environment the players will sell out for.

The last note I’ll make about how we got where we are, is that the league forever has been trying to be the NBA, but hockey is not the NBA. We cannot have a “dunk contest” because there are no dunks or equivalents, as badly as we’re perverting shootouts and pretending it can compete.

Yes, it’s nice to see “personality” from players, but the things that make hockey hockey remain the skills events that are the most compelling: who skates the fastest, who shoots it the hardest, who shoots it the most accurately, who can handle a puck at top speeds through cones, etc. Those things are impressive in isolation, and there they should stay.

With all this, it’s easy to become a curmudgeon about it. I can imagine for a 64-year-old who’s in the trenches every day like Tortorella, it’s all even more frustrating, what it’s become.

But the NHL deserves some credit here. They have allowed the game to morph from an individual honour to a showcase of the NHL game at large. Yes, they still want to create stars (hello, Trevor Zegras), and yes, they still want to showcase the best parts of raw hockey skills, but mostly they want to make it something that appeals to fans and families who don’t think about the league 250 days a year.

Things have gotten sillier, from the captains picking the teams to the fans picking the players, from the costumed shootout attempts to the one-off skills contests based on location (don’t be shocked when one of the skills events in Florida is extremely Florida-themed). The trick has been to lean into that, rather than away from it.

The way it’s set up now, snubs don’t matter as much because the fans voted the fringe guys in and careers aren’t defined by being included or excluded. (Performance bonuses should certainly not be tied to such a thing, at this point.)

The best way to enjoy it for myself, and for people like you – who care so much about hockey that you’re reading about the All-Star Game on a random day in January – is to think of it as some of the best players in the world dumping a bucket of pucks on the ice and having a goof-around.

If you saw that happening and were walking by, you’d stop and watch. You’re still going to see some really cool things, even without their peak commitment and effort. Anything competitive we get is gravy now, but it shouldn’t be expected.

For humans, expectations are what lead to resentment. If you expect the All-Star Game to be what it used to be, you’re going to have nasty things to say about what it is now. But if you accept it’s just become a fun mid-season reprieve where you get to see some of the leagues’ biggest stars with their guards down, you might just have fun.

And given all the stress in our daily lives, would that be such a bad thing? The league doesn’t think so, and I’ve come around too.