We watched NHL All-Star Friday Night because you didn’t
God bless PK Subban.
About halfway through the third segment of “NHL All-Star Friday Night: Live in Music City” on NBCSN and Sportsnet — somehow, the title wasn’t the clunkiest thing about this show — he felt the wave of absolute boredom getting up to his neck and tried like hell to save it. Roman Josi, like Preds teammates Pekka Rinne and Shea Weber in the first segment, was giving poor Kathryn Tappen absolutely zero.
Weber, by my count, said all of two sentences. Thanks for coming out, enjoy the Aaron Lewis song. Or at least try to pretend you enjoy it.
“It’s a fun city and it’s a real hockey city and we have great fans and it’s a big honor to be an All-Star in my hometown,” blah blah blah. Hard to come up with a new answer to literally the same question, I understand, but hooooo boy. So the same question goes to Subban, and he gives approximately the same answer. Of course then there’s one about his suit, and he’s trying to make something work.
And to paraphrase the followup: “You’re a defenseman in a 3-on-3 All-Star Game, so do you feel any pressure to play actual defense?”
And he laughs. He can’t believe it. Josi’s answer is basically, “What? No of course not.” Subban suggests that if the scores are close he might lay out to block a shot.
At this point, it becomes apparent that Subban should just be hosting this, possibly in a big ol’ 10-gallon cowboy hat. But it’s too late now. There are 50 minutes left. Whoever thought it was a good idea to lead off with two hockey player interviews in the first 10 minutes of this hour-long show has a sadist streak running not so deep under the surface. This was some deeply troubling television.
Were there any highlights at all? Let’s not hold our breath as we endeavor to find out.
THE BEST
3. Johnny Gaudreau yawned on air
It was both funny and appropriate.
2. It was “only” an hour long
When they first announced this event, I was very, very worried that it would be two hours, like the NHL Awards. Because the problem with the NHL Awards is that it’s at least half an hour too long, and there was a real danger that same tendency would present itself here.
Fortunately there aren’t enough middling country artists and highlight packages to stretch this any thinner than it was already stretched, so the 60-minute runtime ended up being just a little bit too long to be tolerable. It could have been much, much worse.
1. Retta was there!!!!
Retta is The Best. So they gave her a whopping 60 seconds of air time and allowed her the space to say exactly one funny thing.
Also, whoever wrote the cue cards for Kimberly Perry of The Band Perry — which seems like it can’t be a real band name but apparently is — asked which division she thinks will win: “East or West.” Now, there is literally no way Kimberly Perry of The Band Perry could name more than one NHL player and also made it plain that she is not in any way a television presenter, so perhaps you’d be willing to give her a pass on not specifying that she was talking about the Skills Competition (which is inexplicably divided into East/West despite the games themselves being by division). Or not knowing that she was talking about conferences, and not divisions.
But hey, it’s only a professionally produced television show with plenty of people around who work in hockey. Easy mistakes to make.
Anyway, this should have been hosted by Retta and PK Subban. See ya.
THE WORST
3. Filler
You would think that if you only had 44 minutes or so of time to fill — the hour minus commercial breaks — and five musical performances, plus player interviews, plus wraparounds, plus that bizarre tour of the Gibson guitar factory with Roman Josi and Vince Gill (it’s still not clear to me who that is), there wouldn’t be much time left over. You would obviously be wrong.
There were more than a few highlight packages, each showing off an individual division’s All-Star roster. Which, if you were watching this, you knew already. This event is ostensibly for hockey fans, so no one was going, “Oh hmm, Evgeni Malkin made it this year.” (Interestingly, they actually found a video of Pekka Rinne making a save this year.)
There were also multiple videos explaining that Nashville had a lot of country music in it. Again, this is not something that needs to be said.
And it was enough to make you wonder, “Who is this for?” It’s a Friday night at 8 p.m., and unless you were DVRing it so you could write a mean-spirited review for a certain hockey website, you probably weren’t watching unless you were very much a shut-in, who loves cornball country music, and hockey. What sliver of the U.S. population do you suppose that is? How many zeroes follow the decimal point there?
And while we’re asking questions: Would the league have been better off not holding any event at all and just let everyone go get good and blasted? Would NBC Sports Network have been better off running a test pattern? These questions are technically unanswerable without the help of quantum mechanics, but I think we can all guess that the answer is in the affirmative.
2. Big and Rich
No matter how many times I hear “Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy)” I will always think it’s a joke. Like one of those Weird Al songs that’s not a parody and just supposed to be funny. Unfortunately this lacks the trenchant lyrical cleverness of “My Bologna.” This song came out before George W. Bush got re-elected.
And then, oh my god, they had Lee freakin’ Greenwood come out to sing “Proud to Be an American.” And that song’s from the first Gulf War!
What are we doing here?
(Bonus terrible thing: Lee Brice’s song “Drinking Class” was maybe the worst and most cynical attempt to monetize popular country music’s current anti-middle class sentiment I’ve ever heard.)
1. A stunning lack of authenticity
(I mean, there was a lot “the worst” and frankly you could go on for quite a while here. The conception, the execution, etc. It was all bad. We’ve learned that one thing the NHL doesn’t do well is present an entertaining non-hockey product. The John Scott thing alone is proof enough that it wouldn’t know what fans want if there was a huge poll and there was an overwhelming favorite selected and that was clearly what the fans wanted but the league was like, “Actually it’ll make your kids ashamed of you,” and… where was I? Ah yes…)
I don’t mean to pick on Aaron Lewis himself — well, I mean, yes of course I do, but bear with me here — but this dismal show’s soulless opening performance is the big problem with country music today: A guy who up until like six days ago was only known as the “It’s Been A While” guy from the awful-butt rock band circa 2001 when you’d have thought the butt-rock scene had long since cleared out of the music industry altogether.
Now he’s up there in front of a crowd so flat the NHL bought it at IKEA and assembled it with an Allen wrench, saying what country music is and is not, in a song imaginatively entitled “That Ain’t Country.” Apparently all you need to make it in this town is a camo hat, a pair of cowboy boots with the price tag still on ’em, and a “Don’t Tread On Me” neck tattoo (ah jeez, Aaron). Dude is from Western Massachusetts and he’s telling people in Nashville what country ought to be while affecting a mid-South twang.
And that’s the problem with the entire conception of this special: It’s the NHL saying, “Let’s celebrate country music and hockey!*” with the disclaimer being that it can only be the aspects of country music and hockey that are in and of themselves bland, inoffensive and fake.
It’s so clearly a gussied-up facade that a good gust of wind could have knocked the whole thing over.
Would that it had.
Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.
