There is a lot of pressure on Canada and the United States to put on a sparkly, sparky show Thursday night in the 4 Nations Face-Off final. This has as much to do with nationalism as it does with the belief that hockey has figured out the all-star weekend conundrum that basketball has mangled, but you take it the way it hits you.
And let's downplay the nationalism part. Thursday's show almost has to begin with a line brawl during the Canadian national anthem, because that is precisely the bar the two teams set for themselves when they played on Saturday. Nothing sells these days quite like jingoism, the U.S. is back to treating Canada like the unnamed 14th colony, and well, there are going to be Tkachuks on the ice. The hockey could be brilliant on Thursday; it very well might be since most of the world's best players this time around are Canadians or Americans. But Saturday also gave us three serious fights in the game's first nine seconds, which got the attention of even hockey arrivistes.
A sport that has been steering resolutely away from fighting as a prime selling point for almost four decades has suddenly rediscovered its value. All it needed was two different national flags and some trumped-up (yeah, yeah, pun intended, let's all move on with our days, shall we?) animosity to bring it all back. It’s a moment in the two country’s mutual histories when everyone seems to be spoiling toward a scuffle with one group or another. And, again, this is before the Tkachuk factor comes into play.
Against this backdrop, the NBA's All-Star Kevin Hart Weekend Spectacular came and went attended only by the whimpers of people, most of them who work for the league in one way or another, who didn't like the latest format tweak, are learning to hate the entire weekend and are considering hating the whole sport even while being paid to pay it. That new format—a few minutes of basketball, half an hour of Hart, repeat as necessary—was the latest in a continuing series of unsatisfying concepts, all of them designed to get the players to care enough to make the idea a little less sad. Everybody involved with the hockey game, by contrast, seemed extremely engaged, and to enjoy the fights quite a bit.
But you can see the problem facing 4 Nations, here—how to top the semifinal vibe in Montreal and hook more casuals for Thursday night's reprise in Boston. Hockey fans will watch because the game sells itself when played at a level this high, but that's not the audience the leagues want for events like this. They want people who wouldn’t ordinarily be watching hockey—casuals, but also people who just heard “they were fighting over here”—because they need outsized numbers to sell to advertisers.
Thus, the next test of Tkachuk's First Theorem, which is also known by the acronym SOPO—See Opponent, Punch Opponent. And beating the two-second/three-second/nine-second standard set last week will all but require a re-staging of the opening scene from Slap Shot.
We make no moral stand here, by the way. Of the top ten things an all-star promotion stands for, shameless pandering comes first, second, fourth and seventh. And maybe also ninth. Don't strike a petulant pose here, either. Everything about every all-star festivity is pandering, an attempt to juice up what would otherwise be just the 1,231st game of the year. That’s tough to do, which is why most of the items of interest at NBA All-Star Weekend were extracurricular. Most folks, for instance, were disappointed that Caitlin Clark didn't sign up for the second annual Stephen Curry Pop-A-Shot Spectacular because she decided her value would better be used in service to the WNBA's version in five months. This experience of ephemeral dissatisfaction is part of the deal, and has been since the first fan vote, by MLB, in 1970.
And for hockey purists who think Thursday's game sells itself on its own merit, well, anyone have a sharp take on Sweden 2, USA 1 last night? No? Crickets? Cool. Don't feel ashamed. It's February. People have lives, and news to terrify them on an hourly basis.
So Thursday is going to be a hell of a moment for the sport one way or another. It may only be a brief one, because history is littered with anticipated watershed events that didn't actually shed a drop, and because this is still more or less an all-star event and the ceiling is only so high, there. Either way, a case can be made that the future of the NHL all-star weekend rests in the clenched fists of those wacky Tkachuk lads, if that's your idea of a good time. The answer to that question is between you and your McDavid . . . err, God.
