Each main skilled sports activities league is beginning to face the tough actuality that conventional All-Star video games are a factor of the previous and now not related within the fashionable sports activities tradition.
The NFL has just about already finished away with its sport, changing the Professional Bowl with a sequence of flag soccer exhibitions.
The NBA All-Star sport has change into one thing of a joke, the place even the talents competitors has change into irrelevant.
It was an analogous story for the NHL, which has tried numerous codecs through the years to try to juice curiosity again into the sport whereas additionally punishing gamers with one-game suspensions for backing out of the sport.
Within the NHL’s case, it has a minimum of discovered a short lived resolution to the issue with the creation of this yr’s 4 Nation’s Face-Off event involving the US, Canada, Sweden and Finland.
It’s a makeshift best-on-best event, and the early returns on it have been staggeringly good for the league.
Not solely have the primary 4 video games by means of Saturday been elite, high-level hockey, however they’ve additionally been remarkably intense with no scarcity of drama. Saturday’s United States vs. Canada sport (which the US gained by a 3-1 margin) was one of the anticipated hockey video games of the last decade and greater than delivered on the hype.
It additionally did monster rankings in the US, averaging greater than 4.4 million viewers, making it the most-watched non-Stanley Cup Last hockey sport for the reason that 2019 season, per ESPN.
