TORONTO — Connor McDavid emerged as the $1 million winner in Friday’s Skills Competition. Auston Matthews emerged with the MVP award after his team won Saturday’s three-on-three tournament.
Can we just drop the puck now for USA-Canada in the Four Nations Tournament next winter? Do we have to wait before the two preeminent centers — if you insist, two preeminent players — face off for their respective countries in Milan in the 2026 Games?
If you want the faces of your league to also be the faces of your All-Star extravaganza, then Toronto was the place to be for this year’s midseason celebration. That’s what it was. And that’s what it was because the players bought in.
“I mean, it’s ultimately up to the fans what they think but we were here to put on a show and I feel like we did that,” McDavid, a Toronto native, said. “I think it was entertaining for everybody right from the draft on.
“It’s been a great weekend. It’s been a working weekend and tiring weekend. I’m looking forward to getting back to Edmonton and to our regularly scheduled program.”
You would be, too, if your team were on a 16-game winning streak with a shot to tie the league record Tuesday in Vegas, as are the Oilers.
McDavid, whose goal with 5.4 seconds remaining in regulation sent the first game into a shootout in which his team — coached by Peter Laviolette — was everywhere at this event. He was on the dais for the announcement that the NHL would return to the Olympics.
A longtime advocate of bringing best-on-best back to hockey, No. 97 was more than a bystander in the process of making that happen.
“The players have a voice and they’re using it,” McDavid said after taking the Skills Competition. “I think that’s good.”
It will be interesting to see what kind of a role, if any, McDavid assumes in regard to collective bargaining with the current agreement expiring following the 2025-26 season. A pro sports union is always at its strongest when its most prominent players take visible and lead roles.
That’s a ways away, though.
Folks have been complaining about the irrelevance of All-Star Games for decades. A baseball All-Star Game ended in a tie because the teams had run out of pitchers. I mean, isn’t the Pro Bowl going to flag football this time around?
But you’d have to be a professional scold to find much fault with the NHL All-Star presentation here this week that culminated with Saturday’s entertaining three-on-three tournament in which Team Matthews took the crown by defeating Team McDavid in a 7-4 final after each of the first-round games was decided by a shootout.
Well, Michael Buble was an unmitigated trainwreck at Thursday’s player draft, but that’s hardly on the league.
This was an exhibition, of course it was, no one was going 1,000 miles an hour and there was essentially no body contact on the ice. But no one — not even Nikita Kucherov, who embraced his identity as a villain after his inexplicable half-hearted effort in Friday’s skills competition that drew jeers for two days — lollygagged in this one.
The One Million Dollar prize to the winning team didn’t hurt. Vincent Trocheck, a member of the championship squad, noted that.
“I think it was a mix of both pretty much the whole time,” the Blueshirts’ center said when asked when fun turned into focusing on the win. “Obviously, it’s a lot of money but you don’t want to go too hard, you don’t want anybody to get hurt in these kinds of games where you just want to have fun.
“But you want to win.”
I don’t know that there is a larger meaning to take away from this midseason interlude to a long, winding and grinding 82-game road. Folks in the building enjoyed Thursday’s PWHL three-on-three showcase. The Fan Fair seemed to hit it out of the park, drawing lines two city blocks long at times. Diversity was part of the program in disparate venues across the city of Toronto.
Once upon a time, All-Star Games were romanticized. Back in the day, players were not overexposed as is now generally the case. So these events seemed more special.
Except when I went to the 1973 NHL All-Star Game at the Garden as a fan sitting in the original Section 419, the player introductions were the best part of the night and became even better when Bobby Orr wiped out as he skated onto the ice. After that, though, the game was a letdown.
The East won, Greg Polis scored a couple of goals and won the MVP and, for whatever reason, Blueshirts’ GM Emile Francis became transfixed with the St. Louis winger. Indeed, the Cat acquired Polis over the summer of 1974 in exchange for a first-rounder and Lawrence Sacharuk. Polis was as much a disappointment as a Ranger as the All-Star Game itself.
This event was no disappointment. The NHL put on a good show.
