NHL All Star Game 2K9

When I first walked into my living room tonight to watch the All Star game, I asked my house mate why he wasn't watching hockey. He told me that it was in fact the lead up to the game. Leave it to the French Canadians to combine the only sport that has breaks in the game for fights without suspensions with Cirque de Soleil. While Cirque de Soleil is incredible, it just doesn't fit in my mind with hockey. But the game was in Montreal, so I'm not surprised the two were combined.

Anyways, the game was incredible. Evgeni Malkin scored the goal of the night, flipping a shot between his legs into the net. It was a thing of beauty. Martin St. Louis also scored a beautiful goal that for some reason hasn't been on any of the highlights of the game. St. Louis had a pretty back-handed shot after wrapping around the goal. I guess when 22 goals are scored though, there's bound to be some pretty goals that don't make the SportsCenter highlight cut.

It's not surprising that Alexi Kovalev won the MVP trophy, but I felt that Tim Thomas probably deserved it more. Granted the people of Montreal might have started a riot if a Boston Bruin won the All Star game MVP, but he really earned it. Thomas made the save of the night when he read a 2-on-1 breakaway perfectly, knew what the offensive players were going to do before they did, and blocked the shot wide in overtime. The game should have ended there with a win for the Western Conference, but it didn't.

Instead the Eastern Conference won in a shootout, where Thomas stopped both shots he faced. Thomas is only credited with one save in the shootout, but if you watch the replay he read it right and knocked the puck even wider then it would've been had he just stood there. Thomas had 19 saves and allowed 3 goals, good for the best save percentage of all siv goalies who played in the second highest scoring All Star game in history. Thomas also stopped all the shots he faced in an overtime that included the first penalty in 9 years in the All Star game.

I'm not mad that Kovalev won the MVP, he is the local hero and was the captain of the winning squad, but he didn't do much to separate himself from the rest of the players in the game. Two other players duplicated the two goal and one assist feat that Kovalev had, though neither of them had a goal (or a chance) in the shootout. Seven other players also tallied three points in the game, one of them being Ovechkin who also had the game winning goal in the shootout. Also, both of Kovalev's goals came as the result of a breakaway.

Ok, I know it sounds like I am mad at Kovalev winning the MVP, but I'm not. It's what the fans of host Montreal wanted, the NHL wanted it, and it makes for a better story. The NHL has enough problems keeping their number of fans up, so pissing off a 100-year old fan base is probably not the best idea. It's too bad that a game that was this much fun to watch was on Versus and more people probably saw the game live then on TV.