With the NHL All-Star festivities behind us and the NBA All-Star weekend approaching, I thought I would offer my thoughts on re-organizing the NHL festivities if I was in charge.
First of all, the festivities this year were on Sat Jan 24 and Sun Jan 25 but the last night of games scheduled before the break was on Wed Jan 21 and they didn’t resume until Tues Jan 27 which is a minimum of five days off if you aren’t invited and even longer if you didn’t play on Jan 21 or 27. Now I can understand that players enjoy a little break but when every team is playing back to back games twice a week in February and March and the playoffs are still going in June, you might want to consider a shorter All-Star break.
There were no festivities on the Thursday or Friday as they were used as travel days for players and media. The first event is the Young Stars game which this year pitted the Rookie Class against the Sophomore Class on Saturday afternoon followed by the Skills Competition going Saturday night and the main event on Sunday evening. This begs the question: why don’t teams play on Thursday and start again on Monday? That would still give everyone lots of time to get there for Saturday’s events and if they move the game to Sunday afternoon at 1pm like the Winter Classic, they would probably get more viewers and it would give more than enough time for players and coaches to catch flights to their necessary destinations for Monday night games. To make it fair, make every team in the league play on the Thursday and Monday nights.
The structure of the NHL and NBA All-Star weekends are very similar. The NBA has the Rookie vs Sophomore game on Friday night (instead of Saturday afternoon), the Skills Competition on Saturday night and the All-Star game on Sunday evening. There is rarely an argument made against the fact that the Skills Competition is the highlight of the weekend for both leagues so I wouldn’t change anything about it.
It is also regularly noted that very few fans care about the Young Stars game which is embarrassingly bad in both leagues. In the NHL version, it’s glorified pond hockey and no fan can truly have a stake in either team. If you want to make this interesting allow players in their first three years to compete and make it North America vs The World. This would make it a mixed bag of players and I truly enjoyed the All-Star game more when they used this format years ago. I’ve been saying for years that the NBA should do it this way because of the amount of prominent players from outside North America and this is three-fold for the NHL. The NHL has been a pioneer in drafting and signing international players so why not put them all on display? This would also give fans a better chance to see their favorite players as you could have two ballots. The first one would be for the Young Stars who have been in the league three years or less and the second would be for the main event All-Star game in which eligible players must have at least three full seasons in the league. You could then keep the current East vs West format for the main event. This process would allow more fan picks to go and less public uprising since it would in effect be like having two All-Star games.
This is how the event schedule would look under my guidance:
Thursday
NHL Regular Season games with all 30 teams playing
Friday
All-Star travel day
Saturday
6pm-8pm: Young Stars (North America vs The World)
8pm-10pm: Skills Competition
Sunday
1pm-4pm: NHL All-Star Game (Eastern Conference vs Western Conference)
Monday
NHL Regular Season resumes with all 30 teams playing
This schedule would work well because it would give hockey fans a solid block of Saturday evening hockey that many are used to and on Sunday it gives them some family entertainment in the afternoon. The main event game would still be a dud because no one would hit or try hard but at least there’s more of an excuse since they are all playing a game that counts the next evening.
Since there is no All-Star weekend in 2010 due to the Olympics, this gives the NHL two years to plan and perhaps take my ideas into consideration. It reinforces things for the fans who love the break and for the purists who hate everything about the festivities it would only be a three day break from the regular season. Surely there are enough Classic Games on NHL Home Ice to get them through that stretch.