Ice Capades Break Out at NHL All-Star Game

MONTREAL — Let’s start by listing everything the National Hockey League All-Star Game is not.

Hockey. Saturday’s rather peculiar activity inside the Montreal Forum had no checking, no hitting, no defense and little goaltending. If you exclude the Kings, it resembled nothing you’d ever see on a regular-season night in the NHL.

All-Star. Mario Lemieux did not play. Mark Messier did not play. Wayne Gretzky played, but only as a Special Presidential Appointee, and he performed about as successfully as Zoe Baird. Everybody else seemed to named Teemu or Jaromir, except for the eventual MVP, who was named . . . let’s see, I had it right here . . . oh, yeah, Mike Gartner. Who is Mike Gartner? He plays right wing for the Rangers, he’s been in the league 14 seasons, and he wouldn’t have been here if Messier hadn’t injured his wrist. “I’ve tried to avoid publicity most of my career,” Gartner says, “and it’s worked.”

A game. The final score was 16-6. It 3-0 after 4 1/2 minutes, 6-0 after one period and 12-2 after two. Who won? Either the Wales Conference or the Campbell Conference. It doesn’t matter. Gary Bettman has a nice little task in front of him. Right now, Bettman has inherited the commissionership of a sport whose two most marketable stars--Gretzky and Lemieux--are either on the sidelines or fading in that direction; whose next fleet of stars hails from Moscow, Helsinki and Siberia and not Long Island, New England or Minnesota, and whose existing major-network television contract in the United States consists entirely of the first Saturday in February and nothing before or after.

This, then, was the NHL’s one shot to sell itself to the households of the United States, where Bettman says the future of the sport will be decided.

So what did the NHL give Uncle Fred and Aunt Edna, tuning in on the rabbit ears from Kingman, Ariz.?

The NBA All-Star Game on ice--minus Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley and Shaquille O’Neal.

Fast breaks on offense. Cherry-picking on defense. So much scoring that the sensation becomes meaningless after a while, especially when the people doing most of the scoring are Mike Gartner (four goals, one assist), Pierre Turgeon (three goals, two assists) and Adam Oates (four assists).

“Someone asked me after the game if I’d like to get back into coaching,” said Mike Keenan, Saturday’s losing coach and presently unemployed by any NHL team. “I told him, ‘No bloody way!’ ”

“I want to quit now,” chimed in Scotty Bowman. And he was the winning coach. “I don’t want to go through another game like that.”

At least Saturday ought to be useful to Bettman as he researches what will play with the average American sports fan and what won’t. The far-too-broad generalization has always been: Americans don’t get it because there’s not enough scoring. We like are basketball scores in the 120s, don’t we? We’re used to Super Bowl finals of 52-17. Anaheim and Miami will never sit still for 2-1 grinders, will they?

We are a nation of over-consumers and sliver-like attention spans. Hit us over the head. We have no use for strategic backchecking and lithe stick-handling.

What we want are GOALS! GOALS! GOALS!

Bowman thinks not.

“Ten to 15 years ago, everybody was drooling, ‘Why can’t we play the European style of hockey?’ ” Bowman said. “I think you saw the European style out there today. Talk about a game that’s boring. A game with no checking, no defense.

“I think it shows what a great game hockey is, the way it is now. You just can’t tinker too much with it. By the end of the game, it was a skills competition out there.”

Bowman was referring to the NHL’s most blatant attempt at NBAization--the Hockey Skills Night the day before the All-Star Game. Lacking a slam-duck contest, the NHL tries a Puck Control Relay. Instead of a three-point shootout between Larry Bird and Craig Hodges, the NHL has Al Iafrate and Bret Hedican skate around four pylons.

What about real hockey skills? All weekend long, the NHL bent over backward to deny its heritage. Basketball is basketball, hockey is hockey. Where is the Fighting Competition--Tie Domi vs. Bob Probert in the finals? Where is the Body Slam Event? Hardest check into the boards wins the Cutlass Supreme.

Sorry, no checks allowed. That is the unwritten rule of All-Star Weekend, All-Star Game included. A physical, aggressive sport is stripped of all physicality and aggressiveness, and the puckhandlers run wild, and poor Ed Belfour, the Campbell’s starting goalie, is pummeled by six goals in a single period.

Once, Doug Gilmour got close enough to pound Oates into the glass, as he would on any other NHL evening. This time, however, he pulled up and nudged Oates, gently, with his left shoulder pad.

“C’mon, Dougie!” screamed one female fan from the rafters, obviously disappointed.

She wasn’t alone.

“Most of us prefer checking and good defense,” Keenan said. “I think a 2-1 game, a 3-2 game is exciting . . . This was painful to watch.”

Bettman also needs to do something about the all-star format. Campbell vs. Wales--does anyone actually care? (Me, I’m a Wales man from way back.) Bettman is considering the old East vs. West designations again, or switching back to the pre-expansion concept of Stanley Cup champions vs. the rest of the league’s stars, or maybe experimenting with North America vs. Europe, playing on two tried-and-true American favorites--jingoism and xenophobia.

After Saturday’s 10-goal blowout, the least the league can do is change the name from “Campbell Conference All-Stars” to “Buffalo Bills.”