Sens at Land’s End

I watched the All-Star Skills Competition yesterday. It was, as always, a pretty entertaining event, but I think it could have used more Spezza. The CBC had him miked up so they could have broadcast anything he said to anyone on the ice at any point, but they didn’t. Come on now, CBC, the guy is hilarious.

Here are my random thoughts on this event:

• The obstacle course was so complex I’m surprised the players could remember what to do. Spezza had to do the stickhandling part and he kicked its ass. Way to go, Spezz!
• The format for the Young Stars game this year was a 3 on 3 shinny game for 12 minutes, which was extremely entertaining. Patrick Kane is really rather spectacular. The younger Staal also did a nice job.
• On a related note, I have now determined that Eric is the cutest Staal brother, Jordan is the second cutest, and Marc is the least cute. Poor Marc.
• I want to hate Ryan Getzlaf, but he’s actually pretty funny. Damn you Getzlaf. I can still hate Corey Perry though.
• Chris Pronger was trying to disrupt the interview when the CBC was talking to Perry, and he fell flat on his face. HAHAHA you suck, Pronger. They asked if he was alright and he said no, he’s day to day with hurt feelings. OK, that was amusing. But Pronger still sucks.
• Speaking of which, they had a shot of Pronger sitting with a bunch of kids during the events. Yes, let’s all leave our kids with Chris Pronger! That seems like a great idea!

This new wacky breakaway contest could, I thought, have been really entertaining, but the execution kind of failed. Most of the players just weren’t hot dogging enough. A couple of guys did neat things: I liked Marian Gaborik’s do a lap, snow the goalie, go behind the net move, and Ovechkin (whom I find such a fun player to watch and I really don’t get the people who don’t like him) picked the puck up, bounced it on his stick a few times and then tried to swat it into the net from the air, swinging his stick like a baseball bat. That was pretty cool. I think Martin St. Louis was going to try something that looked potentially awesome, but frickin’ Nabokov came out and poke checked him! Nabokov, seriously … what the hell dude?! If I were St. Louis I would have been super pissed. I am uncertain as to why The Amazing Rick Nash didn’t participate in this event. He seemed like an ideal candidate, especially after scoring that ridiculous goal against Phoenix last week.

Apparently they had the goalies miked up on the US coverage and Rick DiPietro said to Ilya Kovalchuk, “Why don’t you set yourself on fire, set the puck on fire, do a backflip, and score?” Now that would have been exciting. Maybe next year.