The Best (And Worst) Of The NHL All-Star Draft
By Kate Cimini
The NHL All-Star Fantasy Draft is routinely one of the most awkward nights of the year, as @tanyarezak puts it succinctly:
It’s full of bad hair, worse jokes, and is the pinnacle of any journalist’s career.
You should all know I paid roughly $8 billion to go to journalism school so I could cover this. This is the culmination of everything.
— Mark Lazerus (@MarkLazerus) January 24, 2015
And, despite the absolute contrived feeling in the air, it’s still fun as all get-out to heckle, criticize, and cheer for our favorites. As this was all three Blues players’ first NHL All-Star weekend, we had hoped they would go high. Maybe not first pick, but surely top 10 wasn’t too much to ask, was it?
Apparently it was.
The Picks
Team Foligno won the first pick, which in the end really didn’t matter very much to Blues fans since he wasted his pick on Foligno’s teammate, Ryan Johanson.
Johanson didn’t look terribly interested in leaving his beer and comfy seat to go sit on a beerless stage, and most of the early picks continued in this exuberant fashion.
For their first pick, Team Toews picked Phil Kessel, to which we say pbbbbbth. He’s a shooter, but he’s no Vladi Tarasenko.
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Team Foligno then, of course, went with Duncan Keith from the Blackhawks. He might have won a Norris Trophy, but did he win our hearts skating in Greenwich, Connecticut? No, he did not.
The rest of the picks sped by interspersed by the money-making commercial breaks and some rather odd color moments (talking shoes with Tyler Seguin and Steven Stamkos might make great awkward small talk, but it certainly does not make great television) until Team Toews picked the first St. Louis Blues player, forward and sniper, Vladimir Tarasenko.
The next Blues player to go was Brian Elliott, to Team Foligno as their second goalie. Elliott had not yet made it to Columbus, Ohio, as he was a fill-in for Sergei Bobrovsky after Bobrovsky suffered a leg injury during the week. Elliott actually returned from a well-deserved vacation to Turks and Caicos for the All-Star weekend.
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Unsurprisingly, as defense is one of the least attention-getting positions and Shattenkirk has only just earned his all-star stripes, Shatty was the last Blues player to go. But go he did, to Team Foligno.
The Entertainment
Far and away the funniest part of the night came during one of our obligatory uncomfortably close interviews with Pierre McGuire. After he trapped Alex Ovechkin in his clutches, Ovechkin pulled out this lovely handwritten sign to explain his real motivation for attending the NHL All-Star Draft: he needed a car. He needed it real bad.
Sadly for Ovechkin he was picked by Team Foligno after almost making it to last pick, and thus, a free car. Truth be told, I think Ovie was more interested in the free drinks than the free car. It made for a great gag, though, and livened up the proceedings.
What was your favorite moment of the night?
Next: Hockey For The Rest Of Us: Boycotting The NHL All-Star Game