Now *this* is an all-star break
Every league’s all-star game is terrible. The NHL is finally on the right track.
Welcome back to Club Sportico, where we break down the intersection of sports and money—with an extra bit of humor and opinion. Today, Eben finally praises something.
We’re now more than a decade into the All-Star Game Existential Crisis™️ afflicting every major U.S. league.
Once considered a fresh way to showcase big-name players that were hard to watch outside of their home markets, All-Star Games have devolved into pointless, soulless exhibitions. Athletes are unmotivated, and fans hate themselves for watching. If you need a reminder, just take a peek at NBA Twitter this weekend for the vitriol showered on the slam dunk contest (who are these guys?) and the game itself (why even bother?). I mean, who’s excited to see stuff like this??
To combat the death spiral, the NBA, NFL, MLB and NHL have tried myriad small tweaks, searching for a magic bullet in an avalanche of alternative formats, participants, and structures. They’ve sought higher stakes, then lower stakes. Gimmicks abound. Nothing has worked.
This year, however, the NHL has cracked the code: no all-star game. Instead, the league is pausing its regular season for almost two weeks to hold the first 4 Nations Face-Off. Teams of NHL stars from the U.S., Canada, Finland and Sweden are facing off in a week-long showdown that will feature six round robin games and one championship.
The event has managed to check the three boxes that traditional All-Star formats fail every year:
✅ Players are eager to participate
✅ There’s genuine competition from a sport’s biggest stars
✅ Fans are excited to watch
Just look at the scenes from Wednesday night’s opener in Montreal, when Team Canada, led by ageless wonder Sidney Crosby, beat Sweden on an overtime goal from Mitch Marner 👇 Can you think of a recent All-Star moment—in any league—that comes close to matching that passion or excitement? Me neither.
The 4 Nations Face-Off is a joint venture between the NHL and NHLPA, a continuation of owned-and-operated events like MLB’s World Baseball Classic. The two sides will share the profits 50-50, with money coming from the standard Holy Trinity of media/sponsorships/ticket sales. NHL broadcast partners in U.S. and Canada are paying extra for the games, and additional packages were sold in nearly a dozen European markets. The event has more than 30 sponsors—some traditional All-Star Game spenders, others brand new—and ticket sales seem good after a slow start. Sports Business Journal estimated the revenue was expected to be “four to five times” larger than a standard All-Star weekend.
There’s obviously plenty of reasons why this event is not an every-year elixir. The 12-day break is longer than most leagues want, there’s real injury risk that complicates participation1, and hockey fans have been starved of any sort of best-on-best international tournament. It’s been almost a decade since this happened—NHL players last went to the Olympics in 2014, and the most recent World Cup of Hockey was in 20162. Both of those are set to happen again in the next few years, likely rendering the 4 Nations Face-Off moot moving forward, but providing the league more excuses to skip its All-Star Game entirely.
I give the NHL credit for constant attempts to iterate its All-Star weekend. For the festivities in Vegas in 2022, the league had a skills competition in the Bellagio fountains, then had stars play blackjack by shooting pucks at huge playing cards. The following year, in Miami, the league built this dunk tank thing 👇
For the game itself, the league has done conference vs. conference, North America vs. The World, fantasy draft formats, multi-game round robins, and most recently, 3-on-3. None of it really resonated. It’s a problem that has no solution.
The real answer is that we just shouldn’t have All-Star Games. They were a fun novelty for a bygone era, rendered pointless by the massive commercialization of these leagues and the ubiquity of their best players. Look at this side-by-side of NBA All-Star Games past and present 👇
The addiction for sports leagues is—of course—the money 💰. Despite the obvious dislike from almost all involved, there’s still just enough revenue there to hang onto. While participants don’t like them, non-All Star players love the mini break. And the TV viewership is still better than nothing. The NFL’s flag football Pro Bowl last month, for example, drew an all-time low 4.7 million viewers across ABC and ESPN, but it was still the most-watched sports broadcast of the week. And maybe most importantly, league sponsors still pay top dollar to participate in the weekend, both for advertising and for the hospitality benefits.
Just because someone will pay for it, however, doesn’t mean you have to do it. Leagues should be fine to let their All-Star Games ride off into the sunset3, or like the NHL this year, replace it entirely with something more compelling.
After his game-winning goal on Wednesday, Marner gushed about how cool it was to score an overtime winner assisted by Crosby, his hockey idol for the past two decades. I’m sure he wouldn’t have said that if it was a goal from a 3-x-3 “Team Crosby” exhibition.
Canada’s Connor McDavid, the best hockey player in the world, had this to say: “That's as high-end a game as you're going to find, as fast a game as you're going to find. Skilled, great players doing great things. That's what we've been missing for a decade now.”
Definitely cooler than seeing him dropped into a dunk tank, eh?
Jacob’s ⚡ Take: Meanwhile I’ve been enjoying Unrivaled’s version of an All-Star Break this week: a 32(ish) player 1-on-1 bracket. The final is tomorrow night, but there’s already talk about bringing the event back during the WNBA All-Star Weekend.
Matt’s ⚡ Take: My friends who are big hockey fans are non-stop talking about 4 Nations with such excitement and enthusiasm that I might just watch 5 minutes of the finals 🤷🏻♂️ Emphasis on might.
Programming Note: The Pick Six now comes in a separate post, in your inbox every Saturday AM.
Club Sportico is a community organized by Sportico, a digital media company launched in 2020 to cover the business side of sports. You can read breaking news, smart analysis, and in-depth features from Eben, Jacob and their colleagues at Sportico.com, and listen to the Sporticast podcast wherever you get your audio. Contact us at club@sportico.com.
One of Team USA’s best players, defenseman Quinn Hughes, is skipping the tournament due to a minor injury. Many think that if the Vancouver Canucks were out of the NHL playoff picture he’d likely be playing this week.
Colorado Avalanche star Nathan McKinnon, perhaps the second best player in the world, has never played for Team Canada in a real best-on-best international format. Until this week.
Here’s an idea: the NBA should do ‘ONE FINAL ALL-STAR GAME’ in 2026 as some bigger celebration of the best players in league history. Then no more.
The TV ratings this week will be interesting, likely that the USA v Canada hockey game last night did well. NBA All-Star comparison to other years would be interesting, surely going up against the SNL 50th anniversary special won’t help.