With big money on the line, the NHL Skills Competition could be a hit

Frank Seravalli, Colby Cohen, Tyler Yaremchuk, and Jonny Lazarus had a roundtable discussion to discuss the NHL All-Star game on the latest episode of Daily Faceoff Live.

Tyler Yaremchuk: Do you think having a million dollars on the line will make players more interested during the All-Star Skills Competition?

Colby Cohen: No, I don’t think so. I wish they would be more interested but the events are set up so differently than in the past. I’ve seen clips from the 1991, 1992, and 1993 All-Star weekends and it was so competitive. Tony Amonte is going against Martin Brodeur and Jaromir Jagr is going against Brodeur and they’re battling so hard and you don’t see that effort anymore in these All-Star games. Until we see otherwise I still think it’ll be more of the same.

Frank Seravalli: I think this year’s skills competition is going to be the best one we’ve seen since then. And the reason for that is not just the million dollars, theoretically the players should have bought in because Connor McDavid helped design it. When you get him to buy-in and then Leon Draisaitl, it trickles down, you get the 11 best players in the world and J.T. Miller and therefore you put it in a market that matters and it’ll all add up to something really memorable.

I also think getting away from the way it was set-up before where it was, hey you do the fastest skater then you don’t do anything for 45 minutes. Players don’t like that because they don’t want to sit there and not be entertained. I think you’re going to see everybody rev up. I also wanted to hit on this though, because when you said this it made me think of it, were those skills competitions awesome because they were legitimately good or is it just because that’s when we were kids and that’s what we remember?

Colby Cohen: I’m watching it now and I still think it was awesome because they’re competing so hard against each other but yeah it’s absolutely because we were kids watching it.

Frank Seravalli: We were talking about this last night, the reason All-Star weekend was so awesome for us in the 1990s is because we soaked it all up as kids and now maybe this event isn’t for us.

You can watch the rest of the episode here: