#belated asg feelings dump that literally no one asked for lmao

[msmargaretmurry]

Apparently the players themselves absolutely hated last year’s all star game which was a shocker to me. It looked fun from my view! But a lot of reporters have said guys were talking shit and didn’t like it. I personally find joy in watching Connor McDavid’s money laundering scheme but it was not as fun as last year’s in my eyes. I do appreciate making it a mega competition where there’s one big prize at the end but I wish more guys competed. This one really just felt like a competition between Cale and Connor for a lot of it.

anon i'm so sorry you sent this EONS ago and i've just been so busy i haven't had the chance to sit down and write out all the all star game thoughts and ponderings i've been having. because i know we are probably all sick of the asg complaining and discourse but i genuinely think it is such an interesting topic! what makes a "good" all star weekend? what is the criteria for measuring "good"? ideally you create an event that is widely appealing to both fans and players but that's surprisingly difficult, and imo sometimes those things are kind of fundamentally at odds!

lots of asg thoughts (complaints) under the cut lol sorry, i do not expect people to actually read all this

i'm not SHOCKED to hear that players didn't like the asw in florida because i feel like guys have been complaining about the asw since time immemorial, but i too am surprised that they apparently complained so much that the nhl decided they had to overhaul the whole skills comp. i went to the asg in florida and certainly had my quibbles about the experience from a fan standpoint but overall had a really fun time. my main complaint is that there was too many pre-recorded stuff during the skills comp — like, i didn't pay money to sit in this arena and watch videos on the jumbotron, you know? so while i do like when there's a special skills event that kind of pays homage to the host city, and i surely am not complaining about the #content we got out of the dunk tank, that was a little frustrating!

a complaint i know players have had about the skills competition in the past is that they don't want to be embarrassed, and while obviously it can be embarrassing to fall during fastest skater or take 46 seconds doing the accuracy shooting, it has seemed like for a lot of them the events they think are most likely to be embarrassing are the events that rely on leaning into personality and being silly/funny and creative in non-hockey ways — events that really lean into the entertainment part of it all instead of the athlete part, like the breakaway challenge. the vast majority of these guys do not like to think of themselves as entertainers! in their minds they're just hockey players! and hockey culture actively dissuades guys from standing out and having loud personalities so it makes sense that many of them would be more comfortable in a contest that's pure skills!

unfortunately the most fun and memorable parts of all star weekends are almost always the parts where guys DO show a lot of personality and/or are blatantly just having fun, not when they're concentrating super hard on executing skills events. i caught a bit of the nfl pro bowl and was so struck by how it seemed like the players were having so much FUN. there was so much JOY. it made it compelling and entertaining even though it don't follow the nfl closely enough to know who many of the guys at the pro bowl were.

like, i'm not knocking pure skills events. i genuinely enjoy watching these elite athletes be extremely good at things. the classic skills events — fastest skater, hardest shot — are fun to watch! and i'm not fundamentally opposed to more pure skills events. the pvp goalie save streak event was so fun, for example. but i thought a lot of the events invented for this year were too samey. they didn't really showcase different types of skills, they were just riffing on similar skill sets. it wasn't compelling to me, and i also thought it was kind of lol that everyone but connor had to learn the events on the fly and that definitely disadvantaged them.

AND i truly hated that only a handful of guys got to do the skills competition. to me one of the most fun things about the skills comp is the chance to see guys from teams all across the league and have some surprises about who does really well in events! that can't happen when the nhl decides that two-thirds of the teams don't even get representation in the skills comp, that over half the players aren't good enough to include in the event. who knows, maybe those guys preferred hanging out and drinking and watching, and that's valid of them, but as a fan — you invited my guys to the asg but didn't think they were good enough to do a few silly skill games? felt kinda shitty, man!

so while i do like connor, it really irked me the way the whole competition felt like it was designed to showcase him. yes, he's truly great, and it's fun to watch him be great! but i can turn on literally any oilers game and watch him be great; i don't need a whole event designed to showcase it. i want the the all star weekend to celebrate the LEAGUE, to use this opportunity to highlight great players who maybe DON'T constantly get the spotlight anyway IN ADDITION to the big names. i can't remember any skills comp in the past, even ones featuring generational talents at their peaks, that felt so pointedly designed to showcase a single player and it really rubbed me the wrong way. this isn't a knock against connor; it's a knock against how the nhl framed and presented the whole thing.

obviously this is my personal opinion, i've seen plenty of people who thought it was fun. that's valid! i am not The ASG Worth Decider, i am just one fan with a lot of feelings. i can also understand how it could have been more fun in-person than televised. unfortunately i was watching on tv so that's the only experience i can opine about. but also in addition to my personal opinion i objectively feel like it's a huge missed marketing opportunity. you're not gonna spark people's interests in watching new teams/players if you keep hammering home that this one guy is the guy worth watching.

though honestly, the entire skills comp experience for me was deeply colored by how awful i thought the commentary was. the constant judginess toward players instead of joy and celebration of players was gross. the way they kept leaning hard into the million dollar prize as this huge motivating factor for these millionaires to win a series of silly games was gross. it's very possible i would have enjoyed it more if the commentary didn't suck so much, lmao.

also sorry i gotta complain real quick about the sheer number of canucks and leafs. sorry i know this is such an annoying complaint. i am even very fond of a lot of the guys from those teams who were voted in but my god there were too many of them. i would have let three leafs slide since they're the host team and toronto is ~so special~ even though many host teams have only gotten one or two players in the past, but this was a bridge too far. "they were decided by popular vote what else did you expect" i'm not an idiot, okay, that is exactly what i expected to happen with the popular vote. my complaint is not that the popular vote popular voted, it's that the nhl decided that's how they were gonna do things. the whole damn system is bad!!!

and lest it be concluded from this post that i am SOLELY a hater let me say for the record that i don't think the whole thing was bad. there were some really fun moments! i love that they brought the asg draft back and i had a lot of fun watching it. i thought the ACTUAL all star games were really entertaining and fun to watch. i thought that one musical guest in the sens outfit killed it. my beef is really just with a bunch of aspects of the skills comp lmao.

in conclusion: more joy!!! more celebration of the league as a whole!!! more chances for unexpected all star heroes!!!