By JEFFREY BATTLE
During this time of the year, we have the pleasure of seeing some of the best athletes from different sports play a game: The All-Star game. When it came to this year, the All-Star games have been horrendous. We had the NFL even completely change their format for the past couple of years to such a boring snooze fest of a week. The NBA All-Star was even more annoying to watch, where the skills competition seemed to be reduced to just some “meh moments.” The commentating made it the worst part.
MLB hasn’t even started yet, so what else is there to watch for the American consumer of television? The answer? Hockey. Hockey has been incredible to watch over the past couple of days, and that is all thanks to the brilliant planning of creating a round-robin-style tournament called the Four Nations. It was the best fucking thing I’ve watched in a long time. If you have never watched hockey, that’s ok, and I don’t blame you. As someone who barely has watched the sport itself beforehand, it was fabulous just seeing good competition being played.
See, this was all players from the NHL, basically making it an All-Star game. These four teams consisted of the best of their countries, where 20 skaters and 3 goalies were selected for each team. The four teams are players from these four countries: Sweden, Finland, U.S., and Canada. This round-robin tournament would also give the other teams the chance to play each other, and then the top two teams would dish it out in the final, and one would be crowned the winner. It would be amazing if the NFL and NBA adopted some sort of format like this, but I digress.
This whole tournament screamed nationalism into the hearts of many people from all over the world. Now that all the premises of everything have been covered, I will say that America has been divided for a while now, and, it seemed that everyone united to basically say the 51st state was Canada. We may keep being divided, but it seems that when other countries are pissing us off, we have no idea what to do but to unite. Did things work out the first time the U.S. played Canada? Yes. The U.S. killed Canada, and looked like we were going to set some anxiousness into everyone’s hearts the next time they played. Three fights in 9 seconds would do the trick, and it was amazing to hear that most of it was just the U.S. players itching for a fight due to the Canadian crowd booing America’s national anthem. Did this work a second time? Nope. The U.S. lost in overtime to Connor McDavid (literally the best player in the league right now) in a nail-biting 2-3 game. Did the U.S. get called out by Mr. Trudeau? Yes. And he basically said that you “can’t take our country or our sport.” This felt like some good old-fashioned feud (may have its consequences), but for now it was good. One of the best things about watching this format is that there were a lot of special moments of culture and history that occurred. The special moments of the championship were when Johnny Gaudreau’s wife walked out onto the ice to commemorate her late Husband, and her husband’s brother. Those moments themselves make it more than a game, something even better. This whole idea of creating this led to some of the most impressive numbers in the NHL. Where the average viewership of the championship game was 9.3 million people on ESPN, and at one point 10.4 million on ESPN+. This made it the most-watched hockey game, surpassing the 2019 Stanley Cup, and being the highest-watched game outside of the NFL. These past few weeks put a reminder into us, that yes, we love the games and teams we support, but also the emotions that winning and losing make us feel.
Featured image: CNN
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